NorthWind GFD 3.0

This review and the next one are being written a few months after the previous ones. Now, in October 2000, it's now very much the twilight of the SlotA platform. The intermediary problems of SlotA Thunderbirds with the KX133 chipset are behind us with it's successor, the KT133, and AMD's SocketA Thunderbird and Duron have taken over. You'd be hard pressed to find a SlotA motherboard in the shops, while it seems every day there's a new KT133-based SocketA board. The SocketA chips bring a whole swathe of new cooling and overclocking issues and solutions with them.

With all that said, in the initial excitement over AMD's Athlon a lot of SlotA boards were purchased and a lot of SlotA processors were stuck in them - I'd be willing to bet there's quite a few out there in (gasp!) non-overclocked form, too, and looking for a cheap speed boost to stay their SocketA purchase a little. A further factor is that some GFD's, notably those without on-board power connectors, have a compatability glitch with KX133 motherboards. I experienced this with the old Northwind GFD 2.0 and I heard a few reports from people with other non-powered GFD's.

One company who obviously thinks there's still a market in SlotA and who are looking after people experiencing the problem with newer SlotA processors is Northwind Computers, now with the third major revision of their GFD.

This third-generation GFD is absolutely tiny, being only a few millimetres taller than the switchblock itself. The width across the top of the PCB marks a design decision to keep it as small off the top of the PCB as possible - on their product page, NorthWind say this is to accomodate systems where the PSU is above the CPU, which is fair enough. The major space saving is from only having 6 switches to set - I've seen as many as 16 on other GFD's.

There's not too much more to say, really - as has been noted before, GFD's basically work or they don't. This GFD doesn't suffer the compatability problems that previous GFD's have had - I used it on my KA7 with no problems at all. I could get my 950-cored classic 750 to 1080MHz at 1.8v - this is the same as with every other GFD I've used. The small size of this unit makes it attractive, but the lengthways layout means my water-cooling tubing blocks the switches. Not a big deal, though. BTW, the water-cooling setup there is the Senfu kit (reviewed here) with their SlotA mounting clips (reviewed here). This unit also doesn't get very hot during use, unlike some earlier GFD's.

Pros:
Extremely small, especially height-wise
Small number of switches, simple config
No external power required
No KX133 incompatability

Cons:
Might foul water-cooling or coolers above the PCB (minor niggle, true of almost all GFD's)