Outside Loop Afterburner
This has been a long time coming. You see, we received the Outside Loop Afterburner quite some time ago, and although it has been a great product that we've been using since we got it, we simply forgot it was there. Maybe that's a testament on how good this product is. Simply plug in, overclock and forget about it. Well, today we are going to remedy the injustice we have done to Outside Loop computers and we are going to finally write about it.
So what does the Afterburner really do? Simply put, the Afterburner is an overclocking device for the AMD Athlon processor. As many of you know, the AMD Athlon's design didn't allow for the manipulation of the multiplier setting from the motherboard. Instead those who wanted to manipulate the multiplier for the purposes of overclocking, they had to open up the processor case, whip out the soldering iron and start soldering resistors on the processor itself. I don't know about you, but that's not my idea of fun. Never mind the fact that you must be very skilled with a soldering iron to perform those delicate modifications. Thank god AMD included a very special connector on the processor PCB itself called the "Golden Fingers" connector. By attaching a "special" device to this connector you were able to manipulate not only the CPU multiplier, but also the processor voltage. That's where Outside Loop Computers came in with their Afterburner card.
As you can see from the above pictures, it's a small unit with 3 dials, a power connector, a connector to attach it to your Athlon "Golden Fingers" and a piece of sticky tape to hold it firmly on to of the PCB of your CPU. The first two dials control the processor's multiplier settings, and the last dial adjusts the processor's core voltage all the way up to a maximum of 2 volts.
You simply plug the power connector to your power supply and the Afterburner card into the Athlon "Golden Fingers" connector, adjust the voltage and multiplier dials and you are on your way to tweaking your Athlon processor to the max. Don't forget to plug power into the Afterburner, cause no matter what your motherboard says, your processor will get a jolt of 2 volts core voltage. Not exactly a health shake.
The only difficult part is taking apart your Athlon casing to reach the "Golden Fingers" connector. With a little care and finesse pulling the case apart can be accomplished with minimal carnage. Of course breaking your Athlon casing will immediately void your warranty, but such is the price you pay for overclocking.
So, why would you fork out money for this toy, when in today's market you have such highly overclocking Athlon motherboards such as the ABIT KA7? Don't forget, no matter how oveclocking friendly your motherboard is, it still won't let you manipulate your Athlon's multiplier settings. It's just like having an Intel processor with the multiplier lock. You can only adjust the bus speed. Using the Afterburner will give you the extra edge in manipulating your multiplier. That directly translates into not having to use insane bus speeds, which your RAM may not be able to handle. On top of that, motherboards such as the KA7 will not let you tweak your core voltage past the 1.80 volts, but the Afterburner will let you go much higher than that. This is exactly the situation we ran into with our Athlon 600 MHz unit. It would boot at 750 MHz, but it wouldn't be stable at 1.80 volts. Adjusting to 1.90 volts rendered it rock solid at 750 MHz. Anything higher than 1.90 volts on an Athlon CPU would be considered BAD MOJO. Of course, as crazy as we are, we went up to 2 volts, for a solid 800 MHz. Remember kiddies, don't try this at home, but if you decide to, don't blame us if you fry your stuff.
The only negative about any "Golden Fingers" device such as the Afterburner, is that they won't let you adjust your Athlon's L2 cache speed. This is not the fault of the device, but merely the fact that the "Golden Fingers" connector doesn't allow for this type of adjustment. Downloading special utilities such as will allow you to tweak your L2 cache. Adjusting your L2 cache from its default ½ to 1/3 may mean the difference of a stable or unstable processor at a certain speed.
There really isn't much to this unit, just a few resistors, three dials, a PCB and a connector. Holding the 1.10 ounce Afterburner for the first time, it hardly seems worth the $70 premium. But, once you plug it in, you immediately recognize what an invaluable piece of overclocking goodness it is.
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