It would have been easy enough to drop the clock rate on our A10-5800K and nudge its voltage down as well, triggering lower power consumption. But this exercise wasn’t about cramming a 100 W APU into a mini-ITX chassis. Rather, we wanted to maintain stock performance at the lowest voltage possible.
A BIOS-set 1.25 V seemed like it was going to be stable. After the system hung a couple of a times in our multi-hour benchmark suite, though, we settled on 1.275 V instead. With all of the platform’s power-saving features already enabled, further cuts would have taken a more efficient power supply, different memory, perhaps, or maybe a minimalist motherboard. Really, though, we were most interested in power cuts directly attributable to the processor.

Overclocking was a little more exciting. Based on our conversation with Sami Mäkinen in Professional Help: Getting The Best Overclock From AMD's A8-3870K, we began our quest with a graphics tweak, pushing the integrated Radeon HD 7660D core from 800 MHz all the way up to 1083 MHz in AMD’s OverDrive utility (this required a 1.275 V northbridge setting). From there, we edged the processor clock up to a stable 4.4 GHz at 1.5 V.
The A10-5800K in our preview story managed a stable 4.5 GHz with all four cores under full load. We tried the same thing this time around, but discovered that, at just under 70 degrees Celsius, cores would jump back down to 1.4 GHz at .91 V to throttle heat if we were using AMD’s reference FX cooler. Even switching over to AMD’s Asetek-designed closed-loop liquid cooler wasn’t enough to get the chip stable at 4.5 GHz this time.

So, we settled for 4.4 GHz across all cores—as high as we could go without triggering performance-debilitating issues throughout our suite. But we noticed another strange behavior that might affect the peak overclock of an aggressive enthusiast. As soon as we crested 4.5 GHz and started trying to push 4.6 and 4.7 GHz, slowly increasing voltage along the way, MSI’s FM2-A85XA-G65 motherboard forcibly pushed down our multiplier (as low as 29x in some cases), despite UEFI and OverDrive ratios that read otherwise.
We’re not sure if this is a deliberate mechanism to protect the motherboard’s power logic, but it’d make sense when you get to our power analysis and see how quickly consumption ramps up as you increase clock rate and voltage.
At the end of the day, it looks like there might be a couple of different protection mechanisms in play: AMD’s thermal monitor keeping the APU from exceeding a ceiling, and what appears to be MSI’s motherboard from jumping over a certain power level, even with temperatures well under the aforementioned limit.
- Trinity: Great Gamer, But What About Power?
- A10-5800K: The Undervolt And Overclock
- Test Setup And Software
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11
- Benchmark Results: Adobe CS6
- Benchmark Results: Content Creation
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: Compression Utilities
- Benchmark Results: Media Encoding
- Power Consumption
- Efficiency
- The Pursuit Of Balance Warms Our Hearts
At this price point, i would choose AMD Trinity.
Happy to set a couple of systems up and let you know what I find.
At this price point, i would choose AMD Trinity.
Happy to set a couple of systems up and let you know what I find.
So, it's probable that we're seeing a difference in configuration. It looks like Anand is using the Gigabyte A85X board and perhaps an older driver version. I'm on the MSI board and Cat 12.8, with a different Intel setup as well. On the Windows desktop, after 10 minutes on each config, I get 59 W for Intel and 67 W for AMD at idle.
Hopefully this articale can start to filter around particularly for the budget users which A-series is premised to target.
overclock the locked Intel chips? how do you suppose they do that? they weren't testing against Intel K series unlocked chips.
I can't be the only one who was waiting for the money shot of what is the difference in performance when you clock up from 800Mhz to >1000Mhz.
SUCH AN OVERSIGHT. UNFORGIVABLE!
1. overclocked/undervolted benchmarks for the i3 parts
2. dedicated gpu game benchmarks at 1440, 1680, 1920 for the A10 and the A8
3. More OpenCl benchmarks with and without dedicated GPUs for the i3 parts as well as the A10 parts
p.s. I realised I was getting thumbed up and down for this. do these seem like too many requests? nobody has covered trinity like toms and that too with superb writing quality. is it wrong for me to get greedy to read more of their stuff? :-) i'm addicted to this stuff is all. now if you'd excuse me, I have an F5 button to press.