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

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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: Battlefield 3

Battlefield 3 is notoriously dependent on graphics performance, and it's safe for us to assume that the GPU and memory bus overclocks will have the most impact in this title. Unfortunately, the game is too demanding for the A8-3870K to run at 1920x1080. So, we're pulling back to 1280x720.

This game is much more reliant on memory bandwidth to support graphics performance, and there’s a significant difference between 800, 933, and 1092 MHz memory. Once again, the discrete Radeon HD 6670 DDR3 beats the overclocked APU, but not by much.

The frame rates over time chart illustrates the observed results across the entire benchmark. Interestingly, the top-end Llano part is only able to maintain at least 30 FPS when it's overclocked.

Don Woligroski
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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.