What disadvantages are there to using a Golden Fingers card?
Installing a Golden Fingers card is more or less reversible, save the fact the Athlon’s plastic casing must be removed. Simply unplug the card, and the processor once again runs at the speed at which it was sold. The only other deficiency of most cards is the inability to manipulate the cache divisor. Interestingly, the cache divisor can actually be manipulated in software; H. Oda has created a program that will do this from within Windows. The problem is that the machine needs to boot successfully in order for this program to be used; if the multiplier is set too high for the cache, the computer will typically crash well before the program can back the cache timing off. For more information on H. Oda’s L2 cache divisor program, see our preview of the program, written before it became widely available. In theory, a motherboard manufacturer could probably put L2 cache divisor controls in the BIOS, but no manufacturer has yet done so. Several Athlon overclocking cards do offer the abilit
