Athlon Gold Finger Review
K7OC Board
Price: $45
Supplied: Tom Shaver,
K7OC.COM
Page1 - Page2 - Lots of Athlon Pictures
Introduction
As many of you may know, there are several Gold Finger cards out there now. A lot more than there were a month ago anyways. The first to come around was the Trinity Micro one, then others came along, such as Outside Loop Afterburner, Ninja Micro's Freespeed Pro, Hardware Lab's Tweakplug, and there have been many more announced. The way I discovered this K7OC Board was from the forums of AMDZone. So I told my friend about it, that wanted one for his Athlon. It was inexpensive, and looked very professional from the webpage located at the K7OC Board homepage. So I gathered the cash, set the order. 5 days later I'm holding it in my hand. Also a nice feature is the secure online ordering page.
The K7OC Board
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Its very small, about 1½" x 2½". It is professionally manufactured on a PCB, which has a very professional appearance. It has 2 dipswitch banks, and 12 dip switches. The left 4 swithces of the left side control the voltage, the right 4 switches on the left bank and the 2nd dip switch bank control the multiplier. I got confused with the voltage and multiplier being on the same dip switch bank. I learned though. :-) It also has the standard 4 pin power connector cable on it and another outlet so it can be daisy chained. And there is plenty of clearance for the 40 pin connector without interferance of the heatsink or heatplate.
First Impressions
Wednesday on January 19th, I come home and there was a FedEx package for me. I looked at the name and saw it was from "Tom Shaver". I opened it up as fast as I could, I knew the K7OC Board had arrived. It was nicely packaged, with a receipt and documented settings. One of the things that is really nice on this board is you dont even need the sheet included, you can look at the back of the PCB for settings, they are all silkscreened on there. Looking at the instruction sheet and the dip switch settings, I noticed it was pre-set to 700MHz @ 1.65v. Its good to know that the cards are tested before they are shipped. Like the webpage showed, it was very professional looking, and definately looked better than ones I have seen since a few months ago. I couldnt wait to get it going.