AMD A10 and A8 Trinity APU: Virgo CPU Performance
Overclocking Desktop Trinity
We took a bit of time to overclock AMD's higher-end A10-5800K APU as it'll likely be one of the more popular chips in AMD's new line-up that performance enthusiasts will want to tinker with. Overclocking the A10 is somewhat delicate work, perhaps more so than previous AMD architectures.
Dialing up frequency on the IGP will undoubtedly contribute to additional thermal stress on your cooling solution, affecting the CPU, and vice-versa for that matter. You also do not need a lot of extra voltage in order to overclock AMD's new desktop APU. Crank VID too high and you'll generate excess heat that will cause the CPU to throttle without high-end cooling.
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We settled in on a 1.418V VID core voltage on the CPU with a stock 100MHz reference clock and a multiplier of 44X, giving us a top CPU speed of 4.4GHz under load. This was achieved on standard air cooling and our DDR3 system memory set to 1866MHz. Our GPU speed was able to hit 1GHz with full stability as well, over a stock speed of 800MHz.
This may seem like a modest overclock but we accomplished this with a run of the mill aftermarket air cooler, the Thermaltake TR2 R1. Results may vary chip-to-chip and system-to-system but with more robust air cooling, liquid cooling or some other higher-end solution, there is definitely even more headroom available beyond what we're able to show you here.
The benefits of overclocking are apparent as always, with roughly a 10% kicker in CPU performance realized and a 15 - 17% increase in GPU performance for the overclocked Trinity A10 APU.
On a side note, overclocking the GPU on the A10 is easy money. With a simple push of the clock slider 1GHz is attainable with virtually no fuss. Overclocking the CPU can take a bit more finesse with reference clock speeds, multipliers and voltages to balance.
