AMD A8-3850, Sapphire A75, G.Skill Flare and 2600MHz+ DDR

By: Shawn Baker (more) | RAM Content | Posted: Jul 19, 2011 5:46 am

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Unleashing the RAM POWAH!?!?!

The first thing we did was just leave our timings at the default 7-9-7-24 and see how the board went with overclocking. We ended up at 1073.5MHz or 2147MHz DDR. This is a good clock speed and combined with a 3.3GHz APU clock, you've got some really good looking performance here.

amd_a8_3850_sapphire_a75_g_skill_flare_and_2600mhz_ddr

As we said, though, it's a good clock, and a great one for the AMD platform considering the timings. But it's not something that stands out massively. The appeal about this RAM speed is the system remains 100% stable and you could of course run it like this day in and day out.

To be honest, we weren't so focused on 32M HyperPI stability, but instead just wanted to crank the clocks up and see just what we could achieve. What could we get into Windows at? - What could we benchmark AIDA64 in?

What we started to do next was loosen those RAM timings. Moving to a 9-11-9-24 setup, we started to head really north. We ended up in Windows at 1306.8MHz or a simply unbelievable 2613.6MHz DDR!! - As you can see above, we managed to hit the Validate link and get it submitted, but like all Llano based submissions at the moment, they're not approved. It's a little unfortunate, but there's not much we can do about it. Even if we were at 1333MHz DDR the same thing would happen.

That's where we called it an end to day one. We came back the next day to the testbed and got back into Windows at 1306.9MHz or 2613.8MHz DDR. Unfortunately, for some reason I ended up at 9-12-9-24 instead of 9-11-9-24. At this point, though, we managed to fire up AIDA64 and run the Cache & Memory Benchmark.

As you can see above, our Read / Write numbers come in at 11,384 MB/s / 7,585 MB/s. This compares to our typical CL7 1866MHz DDR Read / Write numbers of 9,524 MB/s / 6,810 MB/s. We can see a strong boost in read performance and a nice boost in write numbers.

This is just an insane speed and we'd love to know if it was any kind of record for the AMD platform. Unfortunately, while the CPU-Z information can't be validated on the Llano platform and the fact that Intel hold higher speeds, it's hard to know for sure if it's a record for AMD. To be honest, we felt very happy with what we had managed to achieve nonetheless.