MSI FM2-A85XA-G65 (A85X) Motherboard Review

With a new platform, new board and new processor, you never quite know what to expect in terms of overclockability. What we’re told from AMD is that 5GHz is achievable under a closed loop system like we use (Corsair H80) but on the same hand, we’re told that 1.475V is the limit unless you want to start pushing things to far and having the potential of blowing things up. These different numbers also appeal to different models, including the A4, A6, A8 as used today and the A10 as well.

We’d much rather see what we’re able to get and push to a comfortable voltage that gives us stable temperatures with reliability being at the heart of it and with that in mind, we booted up into the BIOS to see what could be done, starting by raising the multiplier bit by bit.

We decided to do things a bit differently, as we’d normally test all boards at stock and then again at 4.6GHz, but something inside us said that 4.6GHz wasn’t going to be achievable  especially on a variety of boards. With that in mind, we will now be testing motherboards at the maximum overclock for that particular board and with that, we started to push it to 4GHz on stock voltages, with a slight tweak to get 4.1GHz stable and then moving over to 4.2GHz through use of the 42x multiplier, all at the maximum rated safe voltage from AMD of 1.475V.

We did feel that a bit more was left to go and decided to try 4.3GHz and while we managed to boot, Windows showed that it wasn’t stable and so we pushed the NB voltage slightly higher. After this, we then tried 4.4GHz using the 44x multiplier and the same voltage settings as before which showed stability in Windows and also in our extreme benchmark tools that we use to stress test.

We ended up trying to squeeze a bit more juice by use of the bus speed but this led us to having stability issues again and so we ended booting back up and running our benchmark suite at 4.4GHz using the 44x multiplier and a voltage of 1.475V, and though we tried to claw back the voltage, nothing seemed to assist us.

For a budget based APU, the results are still very promising and it’s good to see AMD fighting the good fight when it comes to overclockability and we can only hope that the higher-end A10 may give similar, or if not better overclock results.