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One
Hot Athlon Overclocking Card
From Outside Loop Computers
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As
the old saying goes, "where there
is a will, there is a way".
When AMD's Athlon first hit the market
many were disappointed with the lack
of user configuration options for the
first round of Athlon
Motherboards. Still today, there
aren't many boards out there that can
do much in the way of overclocking the
Athlon.
That didn't stop the good folks at Outside
Loop from inventing a truly
convenient way to overclock your
Athlon processor in just about any
motherboard imaginable. With the
twist of a simple rotary switch the
Afterburner Overclocking card from Outside
Loop will turn your meager
standard speed Athlon into an
Overclocked Hot Rod CPU. Let's
have a look...
(click
images for a closer view)
OK,
I am not going to bore you with a lot
of verbatim on this little
honey. I'll just tell you what
it is made of and how it works.
The design is clever simplicity.
There are five basic components on
this board.
1. Three rotary switches
2. Female three pin power
connector - Yes, the Afterburner needs
its own power source.
3. Resistor Pack
4. "Gold Fingers"
Socket Edge Connector
5. Spacer and Sticky Pad
There
are a few things that are obvious with
respect to what these components
do. The rotary switches adjust
CPU core voltage and clock
multiplier. With an Athlon
processor you don't change the core
frequency or front side bus speed to
overclock. You have to change
the multiplier. The quick little
manual that comes with the Afterburner
gives you a table on exactly what
combination of settings you need to
get the results you are shooting
for. By the way, this is
something we should underscore
here. Just because the Outside
Loop Afterburner gives
you the ABILITY to overclock your
Athlon, doesn't mean your particular
CPU can handle it. Webmasters
all over the net will remind you of
this general rule of thumb, all CPUs
are not created equal. You could
have a speed demon on your hands or a
stock can't-handle-the-juice fairy
chip. It is the luck of the draw
for the most part. You can also
increase your odds by checking out the
database of known good overclocking
date and lot codes for various CPUs at
www.overclclockers.com
This
is what the settings look like in the
manual that Outside Loop sends you
with the kit.
Click to read...
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Needless
to say, you have some headroom for growth
here. You can dial in dozens of
different Voltages and Frequency
selections by simply lining up your ABCs
and 123s. It doesn't get any easier
than this folks.
To
install the Afterburner you need to remove
the outer plastic casing of your Athlon
leaving in tact the metal heat transfer
plate that is attached to the CPU circuit
board. This procedure is relatively
easy to perform and there is no need to
remove the CPU totally from its transfer
plate, which is usually the tough part of
decapsulating an Athlon CPU. You
then simply plug the Afterburner's Edge
Connector Socket onto the Athlon's
"Gold Fingers" mini edge card on
the top of the CPU PCB. The spacer
and sticky pad on the back of the
Afterburner's PCB, keeps the Afterburner
balanced and mounted correctly on the
Athlon card edge. You almost don't
even need the sticky pad but it is there
for extra security. Once the
Afterburner is installed on your CPU, it
is also very easy to change settings while
it is plugged into your motherboard inside
your case. You do this with the
power off, of course.
Here
is a shot of the Afterburner installed on
a typical CPU and Heat Sink / Fan combo.
But
what about the fact that this board needs
its own power supply and what does that
Resistor Pack do? Rather than guess,
we asked Dave Jeffers, Lead Designer and
Inventor of the Afterburner, these very
questions. Here's the response we
got.
Davo
Why do you
need the resistor pack on board and why
the external power source?
Dave J
If refer you to www.tomshardware.com
The external power source is needed to
pull up the voltage on the 4 FID pins and
4 VID pins in the specified sequence to
"dial in" the correct multiplier
and core voltage settings for the Athlon,
described by Tom. While 5V is called
for from Tom, 12V works just as well, and
since fan y-pass through adapters splice
into 12V from any molex connector, we
decided why not use it! The resistor
pack is needed to "pull down"
this 12V to ground at each of the pins,
when called for. Specifically, in
order to generate a "low"
digital signal at a given pin (without
removing the surface mount resistors
already on the Athlon--the REAL challenge
to the whole project!), one must
"pull down" the 12V over a
rather small resistance to generate
this "low" state. In the
process, you generate fairly large current
through the given resistor when it is
switched to ground, so the resistor needs
to be of sufficient power rating (ours are
designed for 300mW max). Tom's
design further calls for 8 more 56 ohm
resistors over the BP_FID lines, however,
we found these were unnecessary, as the
overclocked Athlon is stable without the
resistors.
Davo
What exactly do the other switches that
don't control the voltage to the core do?
I know they change the clock frequency but
how? Is it just the multiplier or other
things too?
Dave J
OK. The other two switches control
the FIDs and BP_FIDs. Toms hardware
again lays out the recipe for each desired
frequency, however, he incorrectly
switched two of the pins, A18 and A19.
Clear
as mud right? :) Well, if you
don't have an electrical engineering
degree, it is safe to say that this little
piece of technological ingenuity just
plain does what it claims to do.
So
what exactly were we able to achieve with
the Afterburner on our lowly Athlon 500?
