Asus F2A55-M (A55) Motherboard Review

We’ve already seen what this APU is capable of in terms of overclockability under the A85X chipset, but with a lower-end A55 chipset, we were keen to see how far things could be pushed in terms of overclockability. Under the A85X chipset, 4.4GHz seemed to be the general rough guidance figure, but for a Micro ATX board with a lesser chipset, we knew that we’d be very ambitious to get the same numbers.

As always though, we cranked the voltage up to the recommended safe 1.475V on the core and NB voltage to 1.3V. We then proceeded to increase the multiplier to 40x meaning we’d end up with 4GHz and continued to boot into Windows. After sitting watching the system stress test for quite some time, we felt that this board had some more juice to deliver to the APU and increased things to the 42x multiplier giving us a clock speed of 4.2GHz. Once again, we continued to stress the system under a variety of benchmark applications including 3DMark11 and Super PI to name a few and once again, things were 100% stable.

Though we tried to increase past these levels, it seemed we were at the limits and settled on 4.2GHz using the 42x multiplier and 100MHz base clock with a voltage of 1.475 even though the CPU-Z screenshot below shows otherwise.

Though we were expecting more from our APU, we do feel that it’s being slightly restricted by the board and A55 chipset and believe that under this combination, we ended up with some strong numbers which should give us some slight performance gains over the reference speed of the APU.