Gigabyte F2A85X-UP4 (A85X) Motherboard Review

As this board features the A85X AMD chipset we were hopeful to see some good results when it came to overclocking and while still in the BIOS we immediately cranked the multiplier up to 44x and started to push the voltages to their safe limits as specified by AMD themselves. We managed to boot into Windows absolutely fine and started to run our benchmark suite of applications to test stability.

Not content on leaving things there, we tried to push to the 45x multiplier and while it booted into Windows, the system crashed as 3DMark 11 was finishing its testing.

Knowing that 4.5GHz wasn’t going to be achievable in this way, we moved the multiplier back down to 44x and started to raise the bus speed to see if we could do things this way, but immediately the system showed it wasn’t prepared to do more than 4.4GHz without an extra increase in the voltages.

We continued to play around a bit more, but anything more than 4.4GHz required voltages of 1.5V + and though the temperatures were safe under this voltage, AMD don’t condone going this high so we backed off a little bit and ended up with a safe overclock of 4.4GHz using the 44x multiplier with 1.475V.