AMD Vision A8-3850 APU & Asus F1A75-M Pro Motherboard Review

Intel sparked controversy after they took the decision to lock their latest Sandy Bridge i3 chips so they can't be overclocked.  But the AMD has a different philosophy and leaves the A8-3850 APU unlocked so we can squeeze a little extra performance from it.

AMD achieves the standard CPU clock speed of 2.9 GHz using an APU frequncy of 100 MHz and a CPU multiplier of 29x.  The graphics clock is also based on this APU frequency so it's overclocked when you bump it up a little.  The CPU multiplier can only be adjusted downwards from 29x so we chose to stick with this and increase the APU frequency as far as possible.  If you like, you can also reduce the CPU multiplier and increase the APU frequency further.  Even though you will end up with a similar CPU clock speed, the graphics core speed will be increased more because it has it's own independent multiplier.

So how much did we manage to squeeze from the A8-3850?

As you can see we achieved a stable overclock of 3.51 GHz using an APU Frequency of 121 MHz and a multiplier of 29x.  The graphics multiplier is fixed at 6x so the GPU was clocked to 726 MHz.  To achieve these frequencies we increased the voltage by 0.5V to 1.45V.  We did manage to achieve slightly higher stable clock speeds but not without putting over 1.5V through the chip which may well be risky long term. We try to aim for safe long term 24/7 clock speeds. Memory speeds increased to 1978mhz.

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