AMD A10-5800k APU Processor Review

The first thing that we need to do before we get underway is to see how far the A10-5800k can be pushed in terms of overclockability and with this in mind, we slap it into our Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4 motherboard and proceed to enter the BIOS which we’re very familiar with and love its ease of overclocking functions.

We started by leaving the voltage at the safe level of 1.475V and immediately went in at the 44x multiplier and found a 100% stable boot and that all of our applications ran flawlessly so we knew that things had to be pushed up a little further. With us knowing that this board can handle a lot of power draw and can deliver that power cleanly to the CPU, we thought that we’d try our luck using the 46x multiplier and this allowed us to boot with no problems at all. We even managed to run Cinebench, Super PI and AIDA64 but both 3DMark11 and PCMark 7 showed signs of instability so we knew we’d have to try the 45x multiplier instead.

Once we were at the 45x multiplier, we found that this booted and was just as stable as running at 4.4GHz, so we tried to increase the bus speed, but these range of APUs really don’t seem to like that when you’re already at an extreme level.

We ended up settling on an overclock of 4.5GHz using a 45 x 100 scenario at 1.475V though CPU-Z still reads the voltages slightly wrong due to the new architecture. Though we know that this could have been pushed further, it would rely on having more advanced cooling and with the market these APU processors are aimed at, we wouldn’t expect someone to run a processor like this with a £100 cooling solution like an all-in-one watercooled unit.