Overclocking: Phenom X4 9950BEAs usual, I did spend some time overclocking the motherboard, well ... the processor and the IGP to be precise. As I had my hands full with the
Phenom performance scaling article, for which I used the DFI motherboard, I can only give you some of my little overclocks.
First of all, I wanted to sharpen my personal AMD SuperPi 1M record, which was at that time set at 24s flat using an Phenom X4 9850 and the Foxconn motherboard. Using my 9950BE, which is a new revision and is said to overclock a tad better, I was able to hit 3.4GHz on air cooling, using a very moderate vcore of 1,488v. Please understand that this result is not obtained during a real
benching session, but during a motherboard test session, which means that the result is not optimized, nor have I reached the absolute end of this configuration.
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Hwbot - SuperPi 1MOverclocking: HD3300 IGPNext to the CPU, there's the integrated video card, which is also overclockable ... and if it's overclockable, we must find the highest stable frequencies! As HWbot is all about breaking records and trying to overtake your opponent to fetch every point you can get, I mainly focused on the benchmarks categories in which I wasn't first to begin with (for those who forgot, I already tested the IGP on the Foxconn motherboard).
When I previously tested the HD3300 of the A7DA-S, I noticed that the overclockability of the IGP on other motherboards, such as the Gigabyte or Biostar, seemed way better as they were able to go past 950MHz core frequency quite easily, whereas I got stuck at 750MHz. In overclocking terms, the DFI did a little better as I was able to go past 800MHz core frequency quite easily. Thanks to an elevated cpu frequency, I was able to overtake everyone in both the 3DMark05 and Aquamark3 class.
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Hwbot - 3DMark05
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Hwbot - Aquamark3In general, I'm quite satisfied by the DFI; the many features and options give the user a wide range of tweak ability and actually quite some stuff to think about. The board acted, in my opinion, a little bit smoother and was easier to handle than the Foxconn board I tried, but that's a feeling that depends from person to person. I can imagine, though, that overclockers who are less known with the DFI bios style will be overwhelmed by the (over)crowded bios.