Overclocking Performance

AMD told us all that Llano desktop processors will have locked clock multipliers, so the only way to overclock the Lynx boards is via the reference frequency, which is set to 100MHz by default. Adjusting this setting will overclock the entire APU which includes cores, graphics engine, memory controller, various interface clocks and bus speeds, etc.

That being the case, we expected the A8-3850 to overclock very poorly. To our surprise, we were able to increase the clock frequency by 25%, and this was achieved without any voltage adjustments. We've included a screenshot of CPU-Z, but please note that the utility isn't reporting all information correctly yet for the Llano processors, including voltage and socket pin count.

Overclocking the AMD A8-3850 to 3.62GHz improved the IGP's frame rate in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 by 19% at 1280x800.

StarCraft II saw a 13% performance increase with an average of 61fps, making the A8-3850 around 45% faster than the i5 2500K.

The overclock also lead to a 20% boost in x264 HD Benchmark 3.0 with the A8-3850 averaging 79.7fps, which was faster than both the Phenom II X6 1100T and Phenom II X4 980.

Adobe Photoshop CS5 received a massive 31% improvement after overclocking and the Llano chip ranked just behind the Phenom II X4 980 with 46.1 seconds.