Professional Help: Getting The Best Overclock From AMD's A8-3870K

Features
By published

We recently hooked up with overclocking guru Sami Mäkinen to get his take on the best way to overclock AMD's A8-3870K APU. Using his advice, we tweaked five retail -3870Ks and compared their overclocked gaming performance to a discrete Radeon HD 6670.

Benchmark Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Upon its release, Skyrim was fairly unforgiving to lower-end CPUs. The developer subsequently remedied the issue through multiple patches.

Our results demonstrate the advantage of higher memory throughput, and overclocking the x86 cores and graphics engine offers another big boost after that. But the difference between 933 and 1073 MHz memory is slight, although the faster data rate gets us even closer to the performance of a Radeon HD 6670 DDR3.

It’s impressive to see just how close the overclocked APU (black line) comes to the discrete Radeon 6670 DDR3 (blue line).

Don Woligroski
Contributor

Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.