AMD FX-8350 (AM3+) Piledriver Processor Review

As we’ve been toying with Intel Z77 a lot lately, it was time to collect the Crosshair V off of the shelf and first and foremost, give it a BIOS update to the latest revision. This will allow us to get the major benefits from the processor and its architecture.

The Crosshair V Formula utilises the 990FX AMD chipset, so we were hopeful to see some nice numbers in terms of overclocking. Reminding ourselves of our results from the 8150 at 4.77GHz at 1.55V, we were hoping to see the opposite side of 5GHz with the new FX-8350 CPU.

The first thing to do once we had updated the BIOS was to disable anything that was going to slow our processor down including Cool and Quiet and other similar technology, we then bumped our voltage up to 1.55 and adjusted the vdroop to reflect the results we required. We then started to push the multiplier, as this is an unlocked chip and we knew this would be easier than raising the BCLK bit by bit.

We managed to get the system to boot at 5GHz with ease and continued to stress the system for some time and decided that we wanted to push things a bit further, now that we knew the system was 100% stable. We increased the multiplier again and ended up at 5.11GHz at 1.55V and only found that other voltages had to be increased ever so slightly to increase the stability at this clock speed. We did try to increase the bus speed after, to squeeze any more performance out of the chip, but this proved unstable and we went back to our original overclock.

Afterwards, we decided to focus a bit more on our cooling and proceeded to point a lot of fans at our socket to see if we could push things further by increasing the voltage beyond AMD’s recognized safe limits. We found that over 5.2GHz was achievable with 1.6V but this isn’t recommended for 24/7 daily use but is good to know if you’re into extreme overclocking.