ASRock A75 Extreme6 Review and Desktop Llano Overclocking
by Ian Cutress on June 30, 2011 12:05 AM ESTOverclocking on the Llano platform, by any stretch of the imagination by using this A75 Extreme6, would take ages to get a hold of and become a master. There are three main areas to overclock - the CPU, the iGPU, and the memory. But the Llano chip design is such that the CPU will only ever have a maximum TDP. If you increase the CPU and fix it at a new higher value, the maximum GPU will decrease to level the change out. Thus, if you're on a GPU limited situation (such as a modern game), then your overall frame rate will decrease. To put it another way, here's a few slides from AMD:
Slide 1: Firstly, on turbo capable APUs, when the GPU is idle the CPU can boost itself until the max level of TDP is reached. This is fairly straight forward.
Slide 2: In GPU heavy cases, the GPU power budget grows and the CPU decreases in response. This could cause several problems - if the GPU wants more power but the CPU is the bottleneck, there's not much you can do. Or of the GPU power is fixed at a high level, the CPU cannot respond by increasing its own power to increase throughput.
Slide 3: With a mild GPU usage, the CPU/GPU power sharing is levelled out, hopefully in the right order.
Slide 4: Now, here's where it gets tricky - a situation demands CPU and GPU power, but moreso GPU - it gets all the priority but the system understands that the CPU needs some too. So the system will reduce the CPU based on both temperature and total TDP.
In the terms of an overclocked system, either the CPU or GPU power requirements will no longer become mobile, effectively limiting the growth of the other - the net result is that if you have an overclocked CPU, your GPU will suffer, and vice versa.
Despite this, I gave the ASRock board a shot of adrenaline and went on a settings test. Sticking strictly to the BIOS, we can either overclock in 'Manual Mode', 'CPU OC Mode' or 'DRAM OC Mode'.
CPU OC Mode
The options are fairly straight forward for the automatic CPU OC options - from 3200 MHz to 3600 MHz in 100 MHz increments.
- At 3200 MHz, the system applies a 111 MHz bus speed, 1.4125 V on the CPU voltage, and 1.150 V on the GFX.
- At 3500 MHz, the system applies a 120 MHz bus speed, 1.4500 V on the CPU voltage, and 1.225 V on the GFX. In reality, 29x120 is ~3480 MHz, and this setting gave a load voltage of 1.512V (from the AXTU software).
- At 3600 MHz, rather than just raising the bus speed, the system drops the multiplier to 26x and applies a 138 MHz bus, with 1.4875 CPU voltage and 1.250V on the GFX. Unfortunately, this failed to boot at all.
At the 3500 MHz setting, we got these values on the benchmarks:
3D Movement, Single Thread: 88.42 (+18%)
3D Movement, Multithread: 297.29 (+18%)
Metro2033: 24.5 FPS (-18%)
OCCT maximum temperature: 51ºC
Thus confirming we get a lower gaming result at a higher CPU speed.
DRAM OC Mode
Due to the memory compatibility issues I mentioned earlier, I pulled out a pair of 4GB Patriot Memory sticks for these tests, from their Viper Xtreme range, rated at DDR3-2133 9-11-9.
In the BIOS, I had an option for DDR3-2000, DDR3-2200 and DDR3-2500. The following resulted from each of these selections:
- At DDR3-2000, a 107 MHz bus speed was applied (29x 107 = 3132 MHz on CPU), with 9-13-13 latencies.
- At DDR3-2200, a 118 MHz bus speed was applied (29x 118 = 3418 Mhz on CPU), also with 9-13-13 latencies. This setting passed all the tests.
- At DDR3-2000, a 134 MHz bus speed was applied, at the 26x multiplier (26x 134 = 3482 Mhz, suggesting that 3.5 MHz is a 'ceiling' in this case), also at 9-13-13 latencies. This setting failed Metro2033.
At the DDR3-2200 setting, we got these values on the benchmarks:
3D Movement, Single Thread: 87.42 (+17%, from CPU OC)
3D Movement, Multithread: 297.29 (+12%, from CPU OC)
Metro2033: 37.6 FPS (+26%)
So despite the CPU OC setting at 3500 MHz decreasing the Metro result by 18%, increasing the RAM to match gives an overall increase of 26% in frame rates. This is highly indicative of what we see in the land of discrete GPUs - they are very, very hungry for memory bandwidth. On a discrete GPU, we see bandwidths in the hundreds of GB/s between the processing units and the memory. We don't see those values between RAM and a CPU, so increasing that bandwidth to feed the GPU makes a significant jump in performance. Anand should have more about this in his article.
Dynamic Overclocking
This ASRock board also has another feature - Dynamic overclocking. The CPU will apply an overclock only when the computer is in use, and revert back to the set BIOS clocks when idle (keep in mind that AMD normally scales between idle and full via multipliers; the HT bus speed never changes). This feature on the ASRock board gives options from 4% to 20%, but can also be combined with an APU frequency overclock above 100 MHz.
I tried this feature in two scenarios - a 100 MHz bus with a 20% dynamic setting, and 110 MHz with a 4% dynamic setting. Both of these worked, giving me 120 MHz and 114 MHz respectively.
GFX Overclocking
The BIOS gives a option to increase the GFX core speed as well, from 654 MHz to 1800 Mhz in oddly sized jumps. I left the voltage at auto, and increased this value from 800 MHz to 1440 MHz, testing Metro 2033 each time. Unfortunately, I didn't see any improvement over stock. I don't know why this is, and as AXTU or any other GPU utility cannot currently report the actual clock rate of the iGPU for now, I'm not sure what is going on.
Manual Overclocking
Time for some real fun. Given what had gone previously with the auto overclocking, I went straight in at 1.5 V on the CPU, and a 120 MHz overclock. This worked fine, so I steadily increased the frequency until the system was not stable after multi-threaded benchmarks and runs of Metro2033. At this voltage, 130 MHz was a good ceiling to reach (29x 130 = 3770 MHz).
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mino - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
"The question now becomes, is Desktop Llano worth the extra $75?"I keep wondering how much it cost to get you to claim Llano is 1/3 more expensive that i3 ?
REALLY ???
1) I do not remember you comparing _whole_platform_cost_ when reviewing Intel chips against AMD, at a time when there was a $30 Intel mobo tax in place.
2) Taking one of the highest-end Llano mobos with the highest-end Llano chip and comparing it price-wise to lowest-end SB (which it thoroughly trounces in everything besides single-threaded pure CPU loads) coupled to a low-end SB mobo? REALLY?
Shame.
L. - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
Eh .. sometimes bias is so visible, I'm not the only one to react anymore ;)But they do it every day... if anyone remembers the Xeon e7 review, where AT clearly showed that a 45nm Opteron was better in perf/watt than a 32nm Xeon ... biggest fail ever on the part of Intel that (they had same efficiency within 2% at full load, but reality is not full load :p ).
Even Tom's Hardware, which was Intel sponsored since the day it was sold wasn't even half as hard on the Llano as you guys ....
The one good info anyone can get out of this is that Intel is afraid of Llano and they're ready to pay a lot to get it slandered... one more reason to buy it, if Intel thinks it's great :)
whatthehey - Saturday, July 2, 2011 - link
No, you're not the only one to "react". You and all your asshole AMD luvin' fanboys from AMD zone or wherever are all over every one of the recent AMD articles on this site. Llano is an inexpensive APU that fails to impress. It's not bad, but for what it delivers? PLEASE!Overclocking? Intel wins by such a huge margin it doesn't even matter.
HTPC? Llano is buggy right now. Your best bet is a discrete GPU for serious HTPC use, and as long as you're getting a discrete GPU, you should buy the better CPU to go with it. Guess what, Intel wins again.
Gaming? Get a fucking clue, L. and duploxx. AMD has some great GPUs, but Llano is barely good for entry level gaming. No one that really cares about gaming is going to be impressed by something that matches a $35 dGPU.
General performance? Intel wins. Doesn't matter if it's SYSmark, PCMark, Sunspider, or some other test -- Intel has a substantially faster CPU architecture.
Pricing? Right now, AMD even loses this. Sure, you can get AMD systems for less than Intel systems, like if you get last-gen AMD. The Llano stuff right now is too expensive on the motherboard side to beat Core i3 and Pentium. When motherboard production ramps up, AMD and Intel will still be very nearly tied on pricing for low-end parts. Hooray!
3DMark. AMD wins in the IGP battle! Who cares about 3DMark? L. and duploxx and a bunch of other retarded AMD bigots who drink the AMD kool-aid and quote AMD PR like a bible.
In summary: everyone with half a brain can see the AMD Llano articles at Anandtech for what they are: factual representations of performance showing that AMD only wins on graphics, and only against IGP. Llano is only going to impress the dimwitted folks that slobber over every AMD release. Those who look for the best system will stay away, but I'm sure Best Buy will sell lots of these Llano systems to people that really have no idea what hardware is inside and don't care one way or another.
Snotling - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
"Tomorrow's technology today" they say... Seing as the Board has 3 "legacy" oh, no let me use "outmoded" PCI slots, I would call that "Yesterday's technology in store tomorrow"Who ever needs more than 1 PCI slot anymore? I can easily live with NONE.
But still they keep on designing boards with 2 and 3 of those... try finding a board with a 4x or 8x PCI-E for a RAID Add-on, almost non-existent unless you go for a server board.
This is supposed to be a higher end product for enthusiasts and I'm really NOT enthusiastic about NOT having a PCI-E 4x expansion on it.
dczyz - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
Just picked up a ASUS P8Z68-V PRO and was very disappointed with the lack of support for the Server 2008 based OS's.Since Server 08 is being used in Home Server, and Small Business I would like to see motherboard reviews cover compatibility for that.
mino - Thursday, June 30, 2011 - link
Server 2008 R2 is Windows 7 driver-wise. What more "compatibility" do you want?NOBODY is going to do server OS validation for you on desktop platforms for free. If you need that, go for a proper WS board.
Meaker10 - Friday, July 1, 2011 - link
So again you acknowledge the NB frequency option but ignore it?No look at if this helps performance?
enterco - Saturday, July 2, 2011 - link
The way see it, AMD Llano, used without a discrete GPU, is a good start-up platform for- multimedia management: USB3, SATA3 and quad core are strong points, enabling light video encoding tasks
- a kid's PC, who does not play yet 3D shooters.
Somewhere in this article I saw: "Metro 2033 is the Crysis of the DirectX 11 world (or at least until Crysis 2 is released)"
Ummm.... Crysis 2 sold here is not DX11 capable ? http://www.amazon.de/Crysis-2-Limited-Edition-uncu...
puretech - Saturday, July 2, 2011 - link
"with up to 2x the performance of the highest version of Intel's integrated graphic solutions of the Sandy Bridge second generation Core series."A very statement statement considering all tests last two days show 2 - 6 times higher performance, with drivers and programs (and BIOS) yet to be tuned for the Fusion platform.
whatthehey - Sunday, July 3, 2011 - link
Horse shit. What is it with all the AMD crazies? Llano's IGP is on average about twice as fast as HD 3000, unless you test with a few specific games. Anything OpenGL pretty much tanks on Intel, but the number of current OpenGL titles that people play is quite small... Minecraft is probably the best example. Let's take a few of the major sites.Tom's Hardware:
Metro 2033: Llano is about 2x faster than HD 3000
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2: Llano is twice as fast, give or take (depending on settings)
World of Warcraft: Llano is twice as fast, give or take.
AnandTech:
Crysis: Warhead: Llano is about twice as fast
Metro 2033: Less than twice as fast
HAWX: Less than twice as fast
Civilization V: About three times as fast (one of the few cases where we see more than a 2x increase)
DiRT 2: About 2.5x as fast
Mass Effect 2: Less than twice as fast
StarCraft II: usually less than twice as fast
Legit Reviews:
Resident Evil 5: Less than twice as fast
HAWX 2: about 2.5x as fast
STALKER Call of Pripyat: about twice as fast
PC Perspective:
Civ V: Tied with the HD 3000 in the i7-2600K
DiRT 3: about 2.5x compared to HD 2000
Left 4 Dead 2: Less than twice as fast
StarCraft II: about 2x
So that's four major sites and the highest lead by Llano in graphics is only 3x -- nowhere near the 6x you claim. On average, 2x lead compared to the i3-2105 looks about right, and if you put in an HD 6670 -- which is really the bare minimum for anyone that actually wants to play games -- you get double the performance of Llano. OMFG! That's amazing! Let's all praise AMD for delivering an IGP that can perform half as fast as what mainstream gaming actually needs!
GTFO. I'm sick of all the AMD crybabies. Llano is mediocre on desktops at best. It's better on a laptop, but only for medium detail 720p gaming. To pretend that medium detail 720p is more important than all the other aspects is stupid. But then, no one ever said fanboys were smart.