AMD A10-6800K Overclocking

For the unlocked K-series APUs, AMD recommends using AOD, AMD Overdrive. AOD is a utility that can be downloaded directly from AMD as a stand alone program. AOD can also be accessed and used from within the Catalyst suite, also known as the Vision Control Center.

I actually ran into some trouble overclocking the AMD A10-6800K. First off, as you can see above, the APU was running at 4.3GHz from the get go. Obviously it was in turbo mode, but without anything running other than Overdrive, I’m not sure why it was pushing 4.3GHz.

To manually overclock the AMD A10-6800K, you first have to turn off Turbo Core Control. You can do this by clicking the button with the same name and unchecking the box that says Enabled at the top of the screen. After that, you have full range to overclock the CPU Core Multiplier. I initially pushed the multiplier up to 46X, but when I ran the integrated stress test within AOD, it failed very quickly. I figured the CPU must have needed more juice, so I bumped the voltage up to 1.3875v. This gave me enough juice to run the overclock at 4.6GHz stably.

I tried a bunch of other settings, increasing the voltage slightly, decreasing the multiplier and increasing the reference clock, you name it. Nothing withstood stressing. I have to admit that I am a little disappointed that I was only able to overclock the A10-6800K to 200MHz higher than the stock Turbo speed. Of course, it was 500MHz higher than the stock clock speed, so that wasn’t too bad.

In Cinebench, this translated to a score of 3.85 over a stock score of 3.41. That’s about a 13% increase in performance for an extremely easy overclock.

I was also able to stably overclock the GPU to 1GHz from 844MHz, an increase of about 18.5%. This translated into increased FPS in 3DMark 11 on Test 1 from 9.2 to 11.9, up over 29%. In GT2 I went from 9.94 to 12.72, up 28%. GT3 went from 11.88 to 15.21, up 28%, and GT4 went from 7.13 to 8.89, up nearly 25%.

Overall, the increase in the GPU was much more dramatic than the increase in the CPU, and you might actually get some playable FPS on the low settings of higher end games if you can overclock to 1000MHz or better.

The AMD Overdrive utility also comes with the ability to automatically overclock the APU. I tried using the presets, but failed everytime. I’d recommend slowly working your way up on your own.