AMD A8-7650k Kaveri APU Review

Overclocking and Overclocked Performance

Overclocking is risky business, not only does it void your manufacturer warranty, but it has the potential to damage your components if done incorrectly.

To overclock this particular APU, we placed it into our best A88x motherboard, which in previous reviews, has proven to be a good overclocking base. The procedure we will follow is simple, just adjust the multiplier until the system crashes, we notice artefacts on the screen or we hit over the 1.5v threshold. AMD CPU’s can generally take a much higher voltage, but voltage tweaking is not for the inexperienced.

As you can see, our A8-7650k topped out at 4.3 GHz for the CPU cores and 960 MHz for the GPU cores. Any higher frequencies, the system crashed during any opening process of applications and suffered heavy artefacts on-screen. Yet, that is still a 1 GHz/ MHz increase over stock. All of the below tests will have what overclock was applied to them during testing. The reason we split them down is the CPU made very little difference to the performance of the iGPU tests, used a lot more power and generated a lot more heat.

Cinebench, Handbrake and WPrime

Some modest performance gains to be seen here, heading the pack of AMD chips in all tests.

AIDA64 and Sisoft Sandra Memory Tests

Overclocking didn’t really affect the memory speeds, possibly even made it worse.

Compubench Tests

Due to our new test systems, we could only compare against our range of AMD chips on the FM2+ platform. Here we see an overclock really brings out the best in the combined APU performance.

Discrete and iGPU Tests

Overclocking the GPU cores has released a lot of performance for the iGPU testing, putting it on par with the A10-7850k in most tests. The CPU overclocks yielded around 10% average performance increase.