BIOSTAR TA990FXE AMD 990FX Motherboard Review

Overclocking the BIOSTAR TA990FXE

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.

AMD said that you should be able to hit 4.6GHz on the AMD retail boxed CPU cooler and 4.9GHz on all of the cores. To try this out we gave it a shot. We’d expect this overclock to be easily reached by anyone!

The AMD FX-8150 starts off at 4200MHz in ‘CPU Max Turbo’ mode, so it shouldn’t be that hard to get to 4.6GHz or 4.9GHz, right? The FX-8150 starts off with a base clock of 200MHz
with a multiplier of 21. All AMD FX series processors feature an unlocked multiplier, so you can both lower and raise the multiplier in the BIOS. You can also adjust the base clock frequency to better dial in the overclock. Since we were time limited we overclocked by just using the multiplier to see how far we could push our processor.

The BIOSTAR TA990FXE has an option to automatically overclock the processor. There are three different options inside the BIOS: V6, V8, and V12 Tech Engine. We started out using the lightest overclock on the system, the V6-Tech Engine. Once we enabled this in the BIOSTAR UEFI BIOS we were able to boot right into Windows. Opening up CPUz 1.59 to see where we stand, we can see that the BIOSTAR TA990FXE increased the Bclk to 210MHz. This brought the CPU speed to 3780MHz, a gain of 180MHz.

Not wanting to leave the BIOSTAR TA990FXE at the lowest automatic overclock we pushed it up to the next level, the V8 Tech Engine. The V8 Tech Engine pushed the Bclk up another 5MHz to 215MHz which brought our AMD FX-8150 to 3869.9MHz

The final stage of the automatic overclocking on the BIOSTAR TA990FXE is the V12 Tech Engine. It pushed the Bclk up an additional 5MHz to 220MHz. This brought the FX-8150 to a final speed of 3960MHz. Unfortunately, we weren’t stable; we were unable to run Prime95 long enough to catch a screenshot of CPUz 1.59 with all 8 cores under load. Each piece of silicon is different. Perhaps yours will be stable at the V12 Tech Engine settings.

Not wanting to leave well enough alone, we wanted to see just how far we could push our AMD FX-8150 ‘Bulldozer’ on the BIOSTAR TA990FXE. After a little bit of digging through the BIOS we were able to find out where we can adjust the multiplier. We had to set a custom Pstate. Once we figured out where our multiplier was it became smooth sailing from there on out. We ultimately increased the voltage by .3 Volts on the vCore and raised the multiplier to 23.5 for a final processor speed on our FX-8150 of 4.7GHz.