F2A85-V Pro Firmware
Asus Ai Tweaker remains familiar, without so much as a new theme to distract us from its navigational ease.
The company's D.O.C.P. mode reads our memory kit's DDR3-2666 XMP profile and, when enabled, attempts to achieve the target data rate.
Since AMD's integrated memory controller doesn't support the proper ratio, the F2A85-V Pro multiplied its DDR3-2133 ratio by a 125 MHz reference clock. Unable to boot at this high memory speed, we tried D.O.C.P. once more after restoring the APU's stock reference clock and increasing its memory ratio to 24x. Success!
The F2A85-V Pro’s combination of hardware and firmware optimization allowed our A10-5800K CPU to crest 4.5 GHz with no noticeable loss of stability, but some extra voltage would be needed to achieve that combination of frequency and stability. The motherboard’s 1.4375 V setting gave us around 1.42 V at idle, while its 1.625 V DRAM setting gave us around 1.65 V.
Our target core voltage of 1.45 V was only really needed at full load, and that was achieved by setting the board’s CPU Load Line Calibration to High. Other combinations of higher base voltage and less load line calibration produced less-precise results.
Other Digi+ Power Control settings worked adequately at motherboard defaults.
The main reason we like XMP support is for its automatic timings configuration. The F2A85-V Pro supports those automatic timings through Asus D.O.C.P. mode. We also discovered that the motherboard compensates for higher frequency multipliers with appropriately-looser secondary timing when set to manual mode.
