ASRock 890GX Extreme4 and 890FX Deluxe4 Motherboard Reviews

Overclocking the ASRock 890GX Extreme4

Overclocking greatly varies due to what hardware is being used and who is doing the overclocking. Always remember that no two pieces of hardware will perform the same, so our results will differ from what you might be able to get.

With stock BIOS settings, the AMD Phenom II X6 1055T processor runs with a 200MHz bus speed (base clock) and an x14.0 multiplier that is used to reach the final core clock of 2.8GHz when all the cores are at full load. The past couple AMD 890FX boards that we have taken a look at were able to get past the 4GHz barrier with relative ease. Beyond that though, we were limited by the air cooling that we were using. Today I took a little bit different approach; we went with water cooling for this so that we could try and eliminate as much heat as possible.

This first way I decided to overclock the AMD Phenom II X6 1055T on our ASRock 890GX Extreme4 was through the Optimized CPU OC Settings. I started out at the 20% setting and it was able to boot right up without any issues, so we went back into the BIOS and started increasing the Optimized CPU OC Setting and we were able to get a stable overclock setting of 40%. This brought our AMD Phenom II X6 1055T to 3920MHz with ease.

Once I reset the BIOS so that we could start from scratch I slowly started raising the Front Side bus. I was only able to get an additional 7MHz on the FSB, though it was enough to get us past a 4GHz overclock on the ASRock 890GX Extreme4. If you look at the Voltages of the auto overclock and the manual overclock you will notice that we were able to hit the higher overclock at a lower CPU voltage when overclocking manually.

Once we had achieved a stable overclock we wanted to see what kind of performance increase we would see. Firing up Futuremark’s 3DMark Vantage we were able to see an overall improvement of 2676 3DMarks. Much more impressive is the 5871 3DMark boost in the CPU score alone.