Review: Gigabyte GA-F2A85XM-D3H

by Tarinder Sandhu on 29 January 2013, 09:00 4.0

Tags: Gigabyte (TPE:2376)

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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.