Haswell And Richland Memory Scaling: Picking A 16 GB DDR3 Kit

Test Settings And Overclocking

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When we heard that AMD’s previous-generation motherboards would work with its new-generation processors, we were happy to pull out Asus’ top-overclocking F2A85-V Pro and give it a simple BIOS update.

Our Asus Z87-Pro sample already had firmware of similar vintage to the F2A85-V Pro’s update, so we left it alone.

Scuttlebutt says that AMD’s A10-6800K reaches 4.5 GHz without much effort, but our sample needed 1.425 V to achieve complete stability. It would easily run 4.4 GHz at 1.30 V, so perhaps 4.5 GHz wasn’t a good target?

The problem with 4.4 GHz was that we didn’t want to give the firm a frequency handicap in an article that includes Intel. Our Core i7-4770K was easily running 4.5 GHz at 1.250 V maximum, and we began testing before AMD's sample arrived.

And so the test began with the Intel processor at 4.50 GHz, secure in the knowledge that both CPUs would support DDR3-2400 via overclocking. Two of the kits were DDR3-2400-rated. And one of the kits would even run at DDR3-2666.

AMD’s Richland-based A10 pushed better timings out of these modules at several settings, but its integrated graphics engine was not stable at DDR3-2400. After several attempts to adjust memory controller and DRAM voltage to compensate that instability, I eventually found that increasing the APU from the stock 1.20 V to 1.50 V granted temporary stability. This allowed theoretical XMP-2400 performance data to be gathered on the AMD platform, but you’ll see those results discredited throughout the article.

The System Builder Marathon gaming suite is easily adapted to integrated graphics performance evaluation by lowering its resolution and/or details to Intel HD Graphics 4600-compliant levels. The HD 8760D won’t even break a sweat.