[section_title title=”Overclocking”]Overclocking
ASUS have done their best to not only make this an enthusiast grade motherboard but to also make it novice friendly at the same time. With my trusty 7700K I set out to see just what it was capable of.
In the BIOS is a nice feature called OC tuner. Using this you will answer a few questions and it will then automatically overclock the APU for you. I tried it quickly and it gave me an OC of 4.1GHz using the stock box cooler, which is an increase of 700Mhz over the stock clocks. While there was no doubt I could push it further this was more than suitable for 2 minutes of time and should be a nice little increase for most users.
There are quite a few options in the BIOS, which may make some people overwhelmed but for those looking to fine tune and get the most out of there hardware they will find it extremely useful. To keep things consistent with our previous reviews and benchmarks I set out to hit 4.5Ghz on my 7700k! This will be an incrase of just over 30% in performance which is quite good if you ask me.
Working my way through the BIOS disabling all the normal options I set out to hit 4.5Ghz @ 1.45v first. Knowing the individual 7700k I am using is great as I have a good idea what it can and can not do for the most part. Unfortunately at 1.45v it was not fully stable and while it was fine to use and browse the internet with, it showed some signs for concern during benchmarks.
Next up I tried 1.500V and while I would not recommend this for everyday use, it will be more than fine to run some benchmarks on for a few hours to see what it could do. Bam! I was in luck and was very thankful for that. While I was pumping a lot of volts through this poor 7700k it showed to be stable and it was time to run all my benchmarks. I used it at the 4.5GHz with 1.500v for around 3-4 hours and did not notice any problems or need for concern at all, benchmarks were running smoothly and it was a nice boost in performance.
As mentioned 4.5GHz @ 1.500v is pushing the chip a bit too much. For everyday used I keep it clocked to the 4.1GHz using the OC Tuner feature.
Any idea why the performance results are so much lower for the MSI A88XI board? Same CPU and same chipset, you’d expect the numbers to be similar… but that performance delta is HUGE!
It could be down to a number of things, advancements in drivers between the launch between them; with the APU focusing heavily on AMD software/drivers, it does make sense. But I appreciate what you are saying etc!