Due to AMD's campaign to thwart resellers who remark and overcharge customers on Athlon CPUs, they've implemented a total lock on the Athlon CPU that takes away manual control of the system's front side bus speed as well as the CPU's clock multiplier.

Because of this, any possible CPU overclocking features that might have otherwise separated the GA-7IX mainboard from the AMD reference mainboard have been eliminated.

This means that there's no front side speed support save for 100MHz. No manual voltage control. No manual clock multiplier settings. No manual control of the PCI or AGP clock divider.

Each of these features has been available to owners of both AMD and Intel-based systems for over a year now. Unfortunately we'll have to be satisfied with the Athlon's default performance levels until the hardware that's required to manipulate the CPU's clock divider and front side bus speed is made available by a third party.

To refresh readers, we mentioned the bizarre state of non-overclocking potential that currently plagues the entire Athlon CPU line in our review of the 650MHz part last week:

"It turns out that each Athlon CPU's information is set via a hardware debugging device that physically plugs into a port on each Athlon CPU's internal PCB wafer.

This means that with the right hardware, a user can manually adjust a whole host of settings relating to the Athlon's speed and operation at will, through some simple debugging software. (Granted that they remove the SECC casing on the Athlon first of course)."

So far, no third party manufacturers have stepped forward with their designs on the needed hardware (a PCI card that when used with the special software program allows the user to manipulate the Athlon's clock multiplier and FSB) but we're sure someone will produce one sooner or later.