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.

Power And Temperature

It’s clear that the A8-3870K is efficient at stock voltages and clocks rates; the entire platform stays under 150 W under combined CPU and GPU load.

As we increase the reference clock, there isn't much of a difference compared to our multiplier-only tuning, except for when the system tackles a combined CPU and GPU load, topping out at 252 W. In comparison, the discrete Radeon HD 6670 DDR3 on the overclocked system appears more efficient.

Let’s look at temperatures, using the Cooler Master Hyper TX3:

Temperatures increase appreciably under the influence of overclocking. As mentioned previously, you need good aftermarket cooling to keep the temperatures below 70 degrees, or the APU starts throttling itself.

Don Woligroski
67 Comments Comment from the forums
  • buzznut
    This is pretty cool, this addresses most of the questions I would have about gaming with a LLano part. But it seems Trinity is right around the corner so I would still have reservations about recommending it. Except for the fact I just saw one of these quads for $90 at the egg, which does make a compelling case for folks on a tight budget.
    Reply
  • EzioAs
    Interesting read. Can't wait to see how much of an improvement the desktop Trinity APU brings seeing Llano is better than what I imagine it would be
    Reply
  • esrever
    Don is the best!
    Reply
  • peroludiarom
    Hi Don, you have wrote great article!
    I have just one question - do you try to overclock the memory controller as well, because its not mentioned in the article? Thanks in advance
    Reply
  • mayankleoboy1
    Llano is great, but i am waiting for the die-shrink to reduce power and heat.
    Reply
  • Wife's pentium intel g620 and amd 7750 on budget board and 8 gb budget ram .....only pulls 150 watts max !!!!!!!!lcost less and performs much better. Apu is a epic idea, alas still useless maybe trinity will save the day. Until then the hype and misleading performance promises will still make them money.
    Reply
  • Fokissed
    On page 2 there is a reference to hwbot.com, which seemingly doesn't exist anymore.

    Thanks for catching that, fixed to hwbot.org!
    Reply
  • freggo
    FokissedOn page 2 there is a reference to hwbot.com, which seemingly doesn't exist anymore.
    Makes you wonder how old the article is that a dead domain link made it into the text :)
    Reply
  • csbeer
    "So, we installed it (6670) in the overclocked system and disengaged its on-die GPU."

    I don't get why all these major sites don't test the dual graphics nature of the asymetrical xfire that Llano supports? Marry that APU with a 6570 or 6670 for maximum performance, that's the whole point of the Llano experience imo! I have a Llano notebook and am so hungry for info on other's experiments and results with the APU+DGPU.
    Reply
  • biggerbooger
    Excuse the noob question, but if you had say 2 x 4gb sticks rather than 2 x 2 and you put on a corsair H40 contained water cooler for example could you get much better OC performance? This is looking like a viable option.
    Reply