Written
: 2/16/2000
Written by:
Moto®
Price: $65
PowerCharger Made by:
PowerChips
Introduction
The PowerCharger by
PowerChips is a gold finger device made for overclocking the AMD Athlon
processor. Armed with the PowerCharger, you can freely adjust the Athlon
multiplier and voltage settings to run the chip well beyond its rated speed. The
unit is very much like the
FreeSpeed Pro from NinjaMicro. They both use the same DIP switches to
adjust voltage and multiplier. The PowerCharger is a not as tall but it's wider.
Also, its power connector is not connected to the PCB like the FreeSpeed Pro.
By themselves, AMD Athlons come multiplier locked. This
just means that you can't use your motherboard to adjust that setting. There are
two settings which determine the final clock speed of a CPU; bus speed and
multiplier. The two combined together gives you the CPU speed. For example, an
Athlon 500 has a multiplier set at 5X when it leaves the AMD factory. The CPU
was designed to work on a 100Mhz bus. Taking a 100Mhz bus and a 5X multiplier
gives us a 500Mhz CPU.
To overclock the CPU, you can either increase the bus
speed or the multiplier settings. Because AMD ships their Athlon with the
multiplier setting locked, the only way to overclock the CPU was to change the
bus speed by using a motherboard like the
Asus K7M. However, the chipset used by the K7M proved unstable at any bus
speed over 112Mhz. That gave us just a 12% increase in final speed.
This is where the PowerCharger comes in. The PowerCharger
a key that plugs into the gold fingers of the Athlon, allowing you to increase
or decrease the multiplier and voltage settings. Being able to adjust the
multiplier and leaving the bus speed at 100Mhz mean you won't be stressing your
video card or any PCI devices. The PowerCharger allows you to set the CPU speed
from 500Mhz all the way to 1050Mhz. Voltage can be adjusted from 1.45V all the
way to a core melting 2.05V. Like the FreeSpeed Pro, there are no adjustments
for L2 cache ratios.
The best way to use the PowerCharger would be with an
underrated Athlon. Those are Athlons that are sold at lower speed than it really
is. For example, the three Athlon 500's I have for testing are really Athlon
650's. One of them is a true 650 with 3ns cache, The other two are 650's with
3.3ns cache. How do you find these gems? The easiest way is to go to
K7 Core. They have a listing telling which Athlons are the good ones. Once
you secure a good CPU, the PowerCharger can do the rest.
Next page: Installation
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