As we noted earlier in the review, hitting a clock speed of 4.6ghz only required a 0.100 voltage increase and a simple change of the multiplier.
Achieving 4.8ghz required a little extra voltage – +0.125 according to the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 bios as shown above.
We also changed the Load Line Control to the ‘extreme' setting for complete stability. Until now we didn't need to use this setting.
System validation at 4.8ghz is available over here.
We think this is very impressive for air cooling and is around 400mhz better than we achieved with the last generation X6 1100T.
We tried for 5ghz and managed to get the system booting.
System validation at 5ghz is available here. Sadly however, the system wasn't completely rock solid at this speed and would occasionally bluescreen, regardless of the voltage settings we tried (and there were many). That said, we feel with quality watercooling that 5.0ghz and more would be possible. Clearly, in the right hands the FX 8150 will clock much higher than any processor AMD have released to date.
As detailed earlier in the review, we have to use the software related APM fix to ensure the processor is working at full speed via the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 motherboard.