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Outside Loop's Gold Finger OC Device for Athlons

Master, Frag Master, but you can call me Kyle. Shaken not stirred and all of that. Remember those whacked out James Bond movies? They rock don't they? Well that has absolutely nothing to do with what we are going to talk about. In fact the only tie-in here, is the "Golden Fingers" of the AMD Athlon CPU. Pretty nifty chip straight off the shelf. We have seen how it can be incredibly hard to Overclock though. Now, one company has come up with an OC solution that is not only NOT your everyday piece of hardware, but they did a damn fine job of putting it together.

To get the ball rolling here, we are going to assume that you are totally lost and dunno what the hell we are talking about. Cool? If you are already well versed on what exactly is going on here, I suggest you skip ahead till you get to a picture that catches your eye.

These Golden Fingers that we are talking about are located on the top edge of the newer SlotA style AMD Athlon CPU.

 

In the first picture you notice all the contacts running along the bottom of the PCB, where it is inserted into the mainboard. Now notice the second picture. See what look very much like the connectors at the bottom? Basically the same thing is at the top of the PCB on the left side. These are the Golden Fingers you have been hearing about.

Now up until this point in time, the only way to really Overclock your Athlon well was to go about doing some serious modifications to the PCB itself. This meant the actual removal of components from the PCB. Not for the meek for sure. I sent mine to an engineer to be done because I did not want to hose the Athlon to the point of not ever working again. Which would be VERY EASY TO DO with a soldering iron.

Now the Golden Fingers were used in our mod, except they were soldered to. In the above pic, you can see how we moved the Overclock controls to a panel off the PCB using ribbon cable. A very nice mod, but not practical for most people to do in there own home. Bottom line, you should be very comfortable with a solder gun and electronics before you attempt something of this magnitude. Here is a link to our original K7 Review in which we used the Athlon Mod and achieved some very nice results.

What exactly did our mod do? One set of dipswitches controlled the CPU multiplier. It is not "locked" as it is on an Intel CPU. The second set controlled the voltage going to the CPU. Lastly the third controlled the L2 Cache divisor.

Why do we need all of this? As it stands now, there is only one mainboard out of the market, the ASUS K7M, that allows you to Overclock your Athlon system the way we would one from Intel. Still at best the ASUS K7M only allows for small tweaks to be made and not really any type of extreme OC. Let me tell you very quickly right now. The only mainboard we have come across that has been close to being stable is the Microstar 6167. We had problems with our first one of those, but overall it has seemed to the best Athlon board of the market, in our opinion at least.

So you all up to speed now? Let's get on with the show...