[section_title title=”Overclocking”]Overclocking
Overclocking isn’t only available to the professional hardware fiends these days, but both Intel and AMD have made it relatively easy to get pretty nice overclocks with little knowledge of how to do so. Long gone are the days where BLCK is the key as today’s overclocking is more about multiplier, voltage and temperature limits. That being said, Kaveri isn’t hard to overclock and as long as you stick within the basic rules of overclocking, you shouldn’t do any harm; those who put multipliers of x55 and 1.8v through their CPU’s on a stock cooler will learn the lesson the hard way!
With that being said, overclocking the AMD A10-7700K was a relatively easy experience with the MSI A88XI AC FM2+ motherboard but there was 1 very serious problem, there was no option for manual VCore. I had to check 4-5 times around the entirety of the BIOS and I couldn’t find it. What this means for you is the motherboard will over volt the APU resulting in more heat and a higher power consumption; something that seriously contradicts the point of a low powered APU/CPU.
That being said, it was as easy as setting the multi to what you wanted and booting up and hoping for the best, which isn’t my ideal way of overclocking and due to this, the maximum I was willing to go for was 4.5GHz (x45). My reasons for this were as follows
- Too many volts via auto
- Didn’t want to put unccesary pressure on the motherboard/CPU
- 1.52v kicks out a fair bit of heat, even on our Noctua NH-U12S cooler
For them reasons alone, this board might be capable of more but I settled for a safe overclock of 4.5GHz on the CPU core and 1029MHz on the GPU core. This is still a very nice overclock and should yield decent gains over the stock settings.
I still can’t hide my discontent about the lack of manual voltage control on the core and feel this is either a BIOS issue or I am totally blind; either way the M-ITX form factor board still kicks out the overclock no problems so that is the main thing!
