AMD A8-5600K Trinity Desktop APU Review

AMD A8-5600K Trinity Overclocking

To overclock the AMD A10-5600K APU we decided to how far we could push the processor with the factory AMD retail boxed cooler. This is a budget processor and we figured that many will try to overclock with stock cooler.

We were able to get up to 4.1GHz by raising the multiplier from 36x to 41x without any voltage increase. To raise the multiplier past 41x we needed to increase the voltage from the default of 1.400V. With an increase to 1.425 we were able to bring the multiplier to 42x, 1.45V was able to hit 43x. We tried to bring the AMD A8-5600K to 4.4GHz, but nothing we could do would bring any sort of system stability. At stock speed on the AMD A10-5600K APU we scored 3.17 pts on the Cinebench R11.5 CPU multi-threaded test. With the AMD A10-5600K APU overclocked to 4.3GHz we scored 3.60 pts.

All in all, 4.3GHz isn’t a bad overclock on a stock cooler. Obviously we were hoping for more, but then again who isn’t hoping for more. We though about pushing a little harder, unfortunately we were unable to determine what our temperatures were at.

We tried several different software applications to check the temperature of the AMD A8-5600K, all of them were reading zero degrees Celsius at idle. While I know the Legit Reviews lab can be a little on the cool side, it’s not quite that cold in here. This led us to believe that our load temperatures weren’t right either, and we didn’t want to kill the A8-5600K on the first overclocking run. That can wait until the second time!

We only had to make three adjustments to hit our 4.3GHz overclock today. The first was to simply disable the Turbo core feature on the AMD A8 APU, second was the CPU Core multiplier. In AMD Overdrive we can either select all cores, or each core individually. Today we went with all cores at once, we worked our way up to 43x and were unable to get any higher. The final adjustment that we made in AMD Overdrive was the voltage. Our particular AMD A8-5600K has a VID of 1.4V, as we increased our multiplier we gradually increased the CPU Voltage as well and ended up on 1.45V which gave us complete system stability.