Overclocking

I've used full screenshots with CPU-Z opened up for a reason in this review, given that is not something I normally do. The reason for it is because of overclocking, or a lack thereof. Actually, overclocking is not really lacking, but proper functionality is definitely not there. As you can see in the screenshot above, SuperPi is running, something I always do to get Turbo multipliers to kick in. Having tested so many boards with Turbo now, I have found that not all are equal, and running SuperPi makes figuring out what is going on simple, since it highlights why some boards outperform all others in some instances. In the screenshot above, you can see that the A8-5600K APU that I wanted to include overclocking results for is running at 3.8 GHz. Really, the maximum Turbo for single-threaded workloads like SuperPi is 3.9 GHz, which is a wee bit higher. That also meant that the lower stock performance, which was a bit lower than on the Gigabyte board, was immediately evident, given I saw 4.0 GHz with the A10-5800K rather than the 4.2 GHz with the Gigabyte board. Hence my using the full screenshot earlier in the review rather than cutting it down into smaller images that are easier to see without clicking on the picture.

So clearly, the AMD TurboCore is not functioning properly here. Things immediately became worse - extremely worse - while overclocking because this board only offers adjustments to that grouping of P-State settings I mentioned on the BIOS page of this review.


Under load and during idle, any adjustments to the settings in the BIOS pertaining to the multiplier made the APU bounce the multiplier for two cores down to 14 while the other two cores got whatever speed you had asked for. I know my A8-5600K is capable of at least 4.6 GHz, and so I set what should have made 4.6 GHz work and was, instead, left with this weird multiplier problem. That problem made performance drop below stock levels because only one Piledriver module was actually clocking properly. As you can see in the image above, Cinebench is running, but the CPU definitely isn't clocking up properly.

That said, I'm not going to include any results here. The whole point of overclocking is to INCREASE performance, not DECREASE it, and overlocking is, at this point, obviously very much broken. I did try three APUs, and they all behaved in the same way, and I am sure that my H100 cooler is more than adequate, especially given that temperatures were reasonable. Hopefully, Biostar will update the BIOS soon to get that fixed, as it does seem to affect stock performance as well.