Overclocking
Overclocking comparisons need to be made against the only other FM2 board in this review. We've increased the CPU, DDR and GPU voltages to arbitrary levels and noted just how high each board could run the APU's various parts at.
Motherboard |
ASRock A75 Pro4-M |
Gigabyte A85X-UP4 |
|---|---|---|
Max CPU speed @ 1.50V |
4.5GHz |
4.5GHz |
Max DDR3 speed at 1.60V |
2,200MHz |
2,200MHz |
Max GPU clock at 1.25V |
1,013MHz |
1,000MHz |
There's not much in it; the real limiting factor is the inherent quality of the APU chip. Note that Turbo CORE was switched off.
And we've re-run three benchmarks for the overclocking tests that, on the ASRock, clock the APU at the speeds shown in the table at the top of the page.
The default-spec APU runs at 4.2GHz in PiFast. Adding extra frequency - 300MHz - doesn't help performance a great deal.
A weaker CPU architecture in FM2 APUs means that an overclocked A10-5800K is still slower than a stock A8-3870K.
But combining a higher core frequency, faster GPU clock, and higher memory speeds pushes IGP performance up by over 10 per cent.
You may need to think twice about running these overclocked speeds on a day-to-day basis, especially in smaller chassis, as the in-game power-draw jumps from 104W to 148W.