AMD Athlon Overclocking Guide

Increasing the Clock Multiplier

The second option we talked about was increasing the clock multiplier.  Increasing the clock multiplier can be done using one of two methods: by physically modifying the PCB of the Athlon yourself using the excellent tutorial written by Dr. Thomas Pabst of Tom’s Hardware or by purchasing an overclocking card that interfaces with the feature connector of the Athlon.

The latter is probably the most practical option because you aren’t physically modifying your Athlon at all and it is much less time consuming (and definitely less dangerous) to use an overclocking card than to solder new resistors and remove others from your Athlon’s PCB. 

There are currently a number of devices out there that allow you to interface with the Athlon’s feature connector; these devices are commonly known as Gold Finger Devices because of the close resemblance of the feature connector on the Athlon to golden fingers.  If you really want to get technical, the “golden fingers” aren’t actually golden fingers, they’re copper, but that’s way too nerdy for the scope of this article :)

Currently, all of the overclocking cards on the market can be considered to be passive overclocking devices since they refrain from using active electronics in order to accomplish the task of manipulating the core voltage and clock multiplier of the CPU.  The downside to this unfortunate truth is that the current crop of cards do generate a decent amount of heat and draw more power than they need to whenever a low value is picked for any switch. 

We will see the debut of an overclocking card that uses active electronics shortly, but, until then, we’ll be evaluating the currently available cards that are out on the market. 

We took a look at four cards in particular, Outside Loop Computers’ Afterburner!, the K7 Overclock Card, the Ninja Micros FreeSpeed Pro and the Northwind GFD.