Overclocking the ASRock 890GX Extreme3
Overclocking the ASRock 890GX Extreme3 was a blast and was easy as 1-2-3. 1)Raise the Frontside bus 2)reboot and test 3)Adjust voltages as needed and repeat. The only voltage that had to be adjusted was the CPU VCore. The AMD Phenom II 910e is an energy efficient chip which runs at 1.175V out of the box. Right off of the bat I had to bump up the VCore to get the machine to boot into windows. The only voltages that I had to adjust to reach the final overclock were the CPU VCore, DRAM voltage(probably wasn’t necessary) and the NB Voltage was bumped slightly.
I was able to hit a final stable overclock of 4.069GHz! Would this board and chip combination have gone higher? With better cooling, I would put money on it. Breaking the 4GHz Barrier on air is a solid overclock however you look at it though.
In the event that you have the ASRock 890GX Extreme3 motherboard and the AMD Phenom II 910e Below are the settings that were used to achieve the ~53% overclock. Feel free to use these settings as a guide line, but each and every chip is different so results may vary.
Of course I had to run some tests to confirm a certain level of stability. This first one was Super Pi. At the processors default speed of 2.6GHz it completed one million decimal places of Pi in 26.208 seconds, overclocked it completed in only 17.425 seconds!
3dMark Vantage is a great benchmark for showing performance differences while overclocking. The CPU score improved by 4532 3dMarks which is 49.7% boost, that happens to be a near perfect performance scale as the final overclock was 56.5% over the 2.6GHz that the 910e comes with out of the box.
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