Overclocking
Overclocking comparisons need to be made against other FM2 boards 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 |
Gigabyte A85XM-D3H |
ASRock A75 Pro4-M |
Gigabyte A85X-UP4 |
|---|---|---|---|
Max CPU speed @ 1.50V |
4.4GHz |
4.5GHz |
4.5GHz |
Max DDR3 speed at 1.60V |
2,133MHz |
2,200MHz |
2,200MHz |
Max GPU clock at 1.25V |
1,045MHz |
1,013MHz |
1,000MHz |
Stable overclocked memory speed (using the same exact modules) was a little lower than the two other FM2 boards. The RAM refused to run at any speed higher than 2,133MHz irrespective of which two slots were used. Overall speed, too, was a smidge lower, though the GPU clock was the highest of the trio. Here's how the overclocked parameters shape up in three tests.
The CPU doesn't gain a whole heap of extra performance when overclocked. The reason for this is that it runs at up to 4.2GHz via the chip's Turbo CORE when in stock-clocked mode: we switch off Turbo CORE for overclocking tests.
Higher GPU and memory speeds combine nicely to increase the DiRT performance by over 10 per cent. This, we feel, is the main reason to overclock an FM2 board.