ASRock FM2A85X Extreme6 (A85X) Motherboard Review

We always like to see how far ASRock boards can be pushed as they generally keep up with the rest and sometimes see the board beating the competition. The new AMD A85X chipset does have a lot to offer and we know that our sample A10-5800k is a fairly good clocker so with that in mind, we entered the BIOS and started to push things up slightly by use of the multiplier and ended up trying 44x to start off with a voltage of 1.45V. This allowed us to boot and after stress testing, showed a 100% rate of stability so with us craving more, we went back into the BIOS.

Once we were back in, we found that the 45x multiplier was our next step and this incurred a voltage increase to 1.475V which is our safe known voltage for 24/7 usage. This also gave us 100% stability, but increasing to the 46x multiplier on this board showed up some slight instability, which is where we had to tweak some settings further, such as load-line calibration and other key voltages. Once this was done, the system was completely stable throughout all of our tests, as you’ll see on the next few pages.

We did also try to increase the overclock slightly more by the increasing of the bus speed, but it seems that this APU was at its limit at 4.6GHz.

We then moved back into the BIOS to see if 4.7GHz was achieveable with higher voltages but this required quite a bit jump to around 1.55V which AMD claim to not be a safe voltage for 24/7 usage though our temperatures remained fairly consistent and at reasonable levels.