GIGABYTE AMD A55 User Guide
GIGABYTE AMD A55 CHIPSET OC GUIDE
AMD Llano platform was launched recently, so end-users are trying to understand the platform and how it fits in the
grand scheme of things. One thing is for certain, Llano platform has fantastic potential to make a great all rounder or
home media PC, office machine, even a gaming machine on a budget. We finally have an integrated GPU platform with
some solid graphics performance thanks to AMD!
The key to unlocking the potential of Llano platform is overclocking. GIGABYTE A-Series motherboard range has big
overclocking capability. The purpose of this guide is to show and analyse that overclocking capability and provide some
general pointers and key overclocking parameters, in order to get the most out of the platform to improve end user
experience.
Let's start with the test system used.
SYSTEM:
GIGABYTE A55M-S2V v1.1 (F2 shipping bios)
AMD A6-3500 (tricore, 2.1GHz-2.4Ghz CPU, 444MHz GPU clock)
4GB RAM KIT, Kingston KHX2133C9BD3T1K2/4GX
750W Corsair HX750 PSU
H70 Corsair water cooler
Kingston SSDNow V Series 128GB SSD Drive (SATA0 port)
ATI 11.7 Display Driver
Windows 7 64-bit OS
The following benchmarks were used to assess performance and stability.
BENCHMARKS:
3DMARK Vantage Performance
SuperPi 8M
Cinebench CPU
Cinebench OpenGL
Dirt3 game
wPrime 32M
We chose a variety of CPU and GPU based benchmarks to try and understand how overclocking affects performance. In
terms of CPU based benchmarks we chose SuperPi 8M, wPrime 32M and Cinebench CPU which test single and multi
core performance. GPU based benchmarks include 3DMARK Vantage Performance, Cinebench OpenGL and Dirt3 DX11
video game.
These benchmarks are in no way a final test of stability and for further stability testing it is recommended to use some
form of CPU and GPU stress software. Ultimate stability is still the test of time.
Dino Strkljevic (dinos22), GIGABYTE Australia Page 1
BIOS screenshots
Dino Strkljevic (dinos22), GIGABYTE Australia Page 2
BASICS/KEY OC PARAMETERS
Max bclock: 168MHz frequency (bios settings)
Please be aware that current APUs are all locked. This means that even though a bios provides extra multipliers for CPUs
or frequency adjustment on the GPU, they cannot actually set CPU multi or GPU frequency higher than default values. In
A6 3500 APUs case, the max multi is 24x and that is the highest multiplier that can be set. A55M-S2V correctly sees the
max multi and does not allow higher adjustments but in case you do get those options on other boards they do not work
properly. Monitoring utilities may also show incorrect speeds to the real values in windows. Best way to check is to test
both settings and determine where there is any change in the benchmark.
This board does offer GPU clock frequency change. Once again it is a locked APU and even though you can select
frequency, it will not really change it. GPU frequency can only be changed via base clock adjustment on locked APUs.
How to OC Llano platform properly?
Reference Clock Adjustment
Given the fact APUs are currently locked the only way to properly overclock this platform is to control the reference
clock or base clock(bclock). Default value is 100Mhz and it can be adjusted upwards. Bclock will control CPU, memory
and GPU frequency. Increasing bclock to 110Mhz will increase CPU, RAM & GPU frequency by 10% for example. If we set
24x multiplier on CPU, x5.33 Memory ratio and 110Mhz bclock, the new CPU frequency will be 2640Mhz(24x110), RAM
frequency will increase from 1066MHz to 1172Mhz (110x5.33x2) and GPU frequency will increase from stock 444Mhz to
488.2MHz (444x1.10).
Our testing has two goals, to find the max bclock and to combine the max bclock with max CPU and memory frequency.
Dino Strkljevic (dinos22), GIGABYTE Australia Page 3
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