AMD A8-3870K and Sapphire HD6450 FleX Review

As with many of the ASUS motherboards that we have reviewed recently, the F1A75-M Pro is fully loaded with a UEFI bios. Both easy to navigate and fully featured.

Even though we are using 1600mhz Corsair memory, the bios defaults to 1333mhz. This can be manually overridden without much effort however.

The AI tweaker section has many settings for voltage and calibration tuning, much like the higher end enthusiast level boards targeting the Core i5 and i7 users.

The Advanced panel allows for adjustment over the onboard devices, including the CPU and SATA drives. The Monitor panel shows temperatures and voltage settings, and additional control can be set for Q fans.

The boot menu gives options to enable or disable the full screen image, and to select the boot drive, including optical and USB drives.

The ‘tool' panel can be used to flash the bios, and to store and load overclock profiles.

The system didn't ‘validate' at reference clock speeds, so we wouldn't expect validation at 3.6ghz either …. and we weren't disappointed. You can see it here however.

Overclocking this processor really is simple, and we could get the machine posting at 3.6ghz without a problem. The only issue is the reference cooler we are using which couldn't handle the 1.45volts we needed for complete stability. This would mean that the processor would throttle, lowering the overall performance. Pretty pointless.

Backing down to 3.5ghz meant we could lower voltage to 1.4, and the processor didn't throttle back, maintaining the correct performance level. On a side note, we did get the 3870K posting at 3.7ghz at 1.49volts, but better cooling would certainly be needed. The potential with the 3870K is clearly much better than from the previous 3850 model.

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