GIGABYTE 890FXA-UD5 AMD 890FX Motherboard Review

Overclocking the GIGABYTE 890FXA-UD5

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 1090T 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.

When all was said and done, we were able to bring the FSB of the GIGABYTE 890FXA-UD5 up to an impressive 300MHz. This gave us an overclock of 4.2GHz! This is the furthest we have been able to push the AMD Phenom II X6 1055T to date thanks to the improved cooling.

Firing up 3DMark Vantage, we can see that we improved our overall 3DMark Vantage Scores by more than 2600 points! Much more impressive is the 6500 point boost in the CPU Score! Not bad for the short time I have had this board.