The unit comes in a fairly nice four-color box:
which creates a good first impression. My cost (mid-November 1998) was $229US plus shipping. The package included the AMD K6-2/333 CPU and PL-Pro/MMX Plus! adapter, with the CPU already assembled into the adapter.
The manual (~770KB) is pretty comprehensive and attractive. The only thing that's a little off putting is the back of the box -- the information is fairly old and geared mainly toward 386 and 486 upgrades. The highest Pentium class CPU with performance numbers shown is an Intel P166, and the fastest CPU mentioned at all is an Intel P200. Even the sticker on the front of the box, that announces the "PL-Pro/MMX Plus!," only shows up to an AMD K6-2/300 -- not the 333 that I bought. The only place the actual CPU shows is on a small bar-code sticker on the end of the box.
From past work with four-color printing, I know that such stock can be expensive, and I understand the desire and business need to use up the stock on hand. But it would be a nicer touch to see the top-of-the-line item you just purchased actually on the box...
The actual installation was quite easy -- the easiest upgrade I have performed except for RAM SIMM additions.
The hardest part was unhooking the clip on the Cyrix 6x86 that held the heatsink/fan on the ZIF (zero insertion force) socket 7. Once that was done, and the ZIF lever raised, the Cyrix came out easily and the PL-Pro/MMX Plus! went in just as easily.
The PL unit requires a power hook up to the computer's power supply -- PL's independent power supply (IPS). The IPS allows the PL unit to function even in socket 5 systems which don't supply enough power through the CPU socket to run an overdrive chip.
I was slightly annoyed that the power lead that I had available didn't match the input terminal on the PL unit. But it was only a minor annoyance since PL supplies a Y-adapter that matches up on both ends with a full-sized standard power lead.
After hooking up the power to the PL-Pro, closing the ZIF lever, and re-booting the computer, we were back in business. The Award v4.01 BIOS saw the AMD chip as a 486DX-S at 66 MHz, but it ran just fine. Later, after flashing the BIOS to 4.02, the AMD was seen as an AMD K6 3D at 333 MHz.
That's all there was to the installation!
(Note: I did go back later and change the motherboard voltage setting from 3.48 to 3.3. This gave more stability to the PL unit for overclocking -- in fact, it wouldn't even boot at 366 MHz with the I/O voltage set to 3.48. But it was pretty stable at 3.3v I/O.)
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This page last updated 12/15/98