Performance during Overclocking

We overclocked our AMD Phenom II X4 810 processor on Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P mainboard without any problems. There were minor complications caused by the imperfections of the board itself. The CPU passed preliminary LinX tests at 250MHz frequency without raising the Vcore past 1.3V. It is way better than the 230MHz result achieved on Asus M4A78T-E. And luckily we had no reason to be concerned about the health of our processor, which we thought might have lost some of its overclocking potential because of extremely high voltage it received from Asus board during our previous test session. Tests proved that our AMD Phenom II X4 810 processor could overclock to 3.7GHz.

The CPU clock frequency multiplier and core voltage will lower when there is no workload due to AMD Cool’n’Quiet technology.

Overclocking was performed on Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P with the following BIOS settings:

As we have mentioned before, overclocking on Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P may not be as smooth as you expect it to be. Note that according to the BIOS, HyperTransport bus frequency is set at 1.4GHz, while in reality it is 1995MHz (taking into account clock frequency increased to 285MHz and HyperTRansport bus multiplier – to x7).

It is not very interesting to compare the systems performance when the CPU is overclocked to 3.7GHz on Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P and only to 3.25GHz on Asus M4A78T-E. The results of this comparison are evident. But it is not our fault that we couldn’t get Asus board to work stably at 285MHz clock generator frequency because of a number of issues we discovered, so we had to go down to 250MHz.

It was pretty predictable that Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P would outperform the competitor.  The notorious copy speed Everest test was the only exception: Asus mainboard was a very confident leader here. Although, this victory didn't really pay off. To be fair, we have to say that as soon as (if) all the issues we discovered with Asus M4A78T-E are eliminated and resolved and it reaches stability at 3.7GHz CPU frequency, it will perform just as fast as Gigabyte solution we discussed today.