A88X-G45 Gaming Firmware
The A88X-G45 Gaming pushed our A10-7850K sample to 4.6 GHz at 1.45 volts with little effort. Memory overclocking wasn’t as simple; our DDR3-3000 modules only reached 2292 MT/s, in spite of the memory controller’s DDR3-2400 capability.
The 1.45 V setting took a little guesswork though, since the board only offers voltage offset. Full-load temperatures several degrees below the CPU’s thermal threshold are the best indicator that CPU-Z is reporting accurate figures for this motherboard.
The “Click BIOS 4” overclocking menu is fairly dense, making it easy to find the settings most overclockers access frequently. It even has DRAM reference voltage on the same main menu as main voltage, clock, and ratio controls.
Primary, secondary, and tertiary timings are all packed into a single page of settings. Unfortunately, the board is programmed to use tighter-than XMP timings if the ratio drops below XMP values. That meant we had to manually configure our RAM’s rated timings in order to get as far as DDR3-2292.
The Memory-Z submenu helped guide us towards timings that supported our RAM at frequencies above DDR3-2133.