Liberator 2 GFD Review

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As there are already a multitude of Gold Finger Overclocking Devices on the market today the focus seems to be turning to where they come from rather then what they do. After all, GFD's do basically the same thing - overclock Athlons, and most do. Also little things like buttons and extra power requirements still matter.

That said, we have the first entry from Canada we have seen thus far. Canadian overclockers take note. The Liberator 2 goes for $36 and consists of a small PCB with socket and one row of dip switches. It measures about 40mm square. Unlike the Leufken GFD we have seen previously the Liberator 2 has its instructions printed on the PCB, and even supplies detailed instructions on its usage.

The super-small Liberator 2 gold finger device. Retails for $36 from buyoverclocked.com. It measures about 40mm square.

First off, the two pages of illustrated instructions that come with the Liberator 2 deal with the following points:

• How to install the GFD properly on your Athlon
• How to remove the plastic case from the Athlon
• How to change the settings of the DIP switch

So all in all, the Liberator 2 has some very fine documentation to support your overclocking attempts. I must say that I was very happy to see this level of support behind the Liberator 2 GoldFinger Device.

How to Overclock 101

A lot of the devices we have been seeing pop up around the web have multiple banks of dip or jumper switches. The Liberator 2 works off of one bank of three-position dip switches. By adjusting the dip switches you can manipulate the front side bus and the core voltage. Sometimes an overclocked chip requires more voltage to remain stable.

We tested the Liberator 2 out on an Abit KA7 with an Athlon 550Mhz and 350W Enermax Powersupply (the liberator 2 requires a 300W power supply to work properly). Unfortunately we were unable to get it to work. Any attempts to use the device to change multiplier or voltage resulted in the system hanging. It would not boot, and the BIOS would not post.

Curiously, using the BIOS alone we were able to overclock this same Athlon, and likewise with the Leufken GFD.

Henry Liu, the person who sent us the Liberator 2 to test out was very helpful in trying to solve this problem, which seems odd even to us considering the number of Liberator 2's that are out there, working without fault. In the end however, we cannot rate this product because we were unable to get it to work. And since we only had one Athlon and one Slot A motherboard to test it out on, we cannot conclusively say that the GFD was to blame.