AMD FX-8350 8-Core Black Edition Processor Review

AMD FX-8350 ‘Pile Driver’ Overclocking

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.

The AMD FX-8350 features a base clock of 4.0GHz which is accomplished using a 200MHz Bclk and a 20x multiplier. All of the AMD FX-Series of processors feature an unlocked multiplier. This allows us to increase the processor frequency without worrying about our memory divider, we can still increase the Bclk, though today we will be sticking to the multiplier.

The AMD FX-8350 features a turbo core that will increase the frequency of the processor up to 4.2GHz. It will be interesting to see how much head room this processor still has, we are hoping for a lot since it automatically increases as high as 4.2GHz!

With only a few tweaks within the ASUS Crosshair V formula BIOS we were able to bring the AMD FX-8350 to a rock solid 4.9GHz at only 1.45 Volts on the core. We tried to push to 5.0GHz, but we weren’t able to get anything stable even as high as 1.5 Volts. We didn’t want to push to hard since we weren’t quite sure how hot the processor was getting.

AMD Overdrive wouldn’t read the temperatures of our FX-8350 quite right. We ran into this when we looked at the new Trinity APU’s a couple of weeks ago as well. Sitting at idle AOD was showing our processor at only 7.8 Degrees Celsius, we know the Corsair H100 water cooler is good but even it isn’t capable of going sub-ambient without outside help.

Above you can see that we disabled the AMD Turbo CORE technology, and ultimately increased the CPU multiplier to 24.5x to hit 4.9GHz (200×24.5=4900=4.9GHz).

Within the Digi+ VRM/Power controls we set the CPU Load Line Calibration to High and disabled the thermal and over voltage protection settings.

The only voltage that we had to increase was the CPU Voltage, above you can see that it has been increased to 1.45 Volts which gave us total stability at 4.9GHz!