AMD Kaveri A10-7850K Overclocking Analysis

Final Thoughts

AMD’s Kaveri A10-7850K is a solid overclocker. While we settled at 1028MHz on the GPU we were able to go another divider higher with slight bumps in voltage and the enthusiastic overclocker might even be able to go a couple more dividers up into the 1100-1200MHz region. What a difference the 308 MHz extra made. Pairing up our overclock with fast RAM saw us making large gains in most GPU-centric applications. Most games scaled well and we saw around 10% extra performance compared to stock GPU clocks. Best of all this overclocking only added about 20W to the total system power consumption meaning the A10-7850K with 2400MHz RAM and a hefty GPU overclock consumed less power than the stock last-generation A10-6800K with 1866MHz RAM – very impressive stuff indeed.

If you look at it from a more critical perspective, a 42% boost in frequency only saw 10-20% increases in performance, then yes the A10-7850K could, and should, have done better. It is clear to see that even with 2400MHz RAM the Kaveri A10-7850K is still memory bandwidth limited hence why games did not scale as much as compute applications – because games need a lot more memory bandwidth than compute applications. However, overclocking is still free performance and we’re seeing 10-20% extra performance with only a marginal bump in power consumption so there isn’t anything to complain about here. Overclocking simply makes the Kaveri deal sweeter. What’s more it’s incredibly easy to do: just jump into the BIOS, dial in the XMP/AMP of your fast memory kit, change the GPU clock divider to 960, 1028 or higher (depending on what your system is stable at), disable APM (Application Power Management – which throttles various clock speeds to stay within the rated 95W TDP) and disable turbo mode to prevent instability. The more adventurous overclockers might adjust the reference system clock of 100MHz to something higher, 105MHz~ to fine tune GPU clock speeds but this also alters your CPU, memory and NorthBridge frequencies so you have to ensure they will all run stable at a new higher frequency too.

That brings our Kaveri A10-7850K overclocking article to an end, we hope you found it useful and interesting. What are your thoughts on the overclocked performance of the Kaveri A10-7850K APU? Do you have any questions about it that you would like answered? Feel free to comment below and we’ll do our best to get back to you.

For more AMD Kaveri analysis, testing and results you can refer to our “Ultimate Kaveri Review” which includes memory scaling results, hybrid crossfire results, CPU benchmarks and more!

Thank you to AMD for providing Kaveri review samples that made this article possible.