Kit Guru take Bulldozer to 4.8GHz on air using GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD7

Earlier today, or perhaps late yesterday if like us you live in Taiwan, AMD launched their latest and highly anticipated FX series series processors. Codenamed ‘Bulldozer’ these new 6 and 8-core CPUs have dominated the PC hardware news and review sites over the last 24 hours, with absolutely tons of benchmark and overclock stats appearing online for us to examine and pour over.

One of the more detailed and eye-catching reviews to surface is by Zardon at KitGuru.net in the UK. Zardon used our high-end 990FXA-UD7 motherboard as the platform from which to examine his AMD FX 8150 Black Edition processor. As well as benchmarking the FX 8150 at stock settings, Zardon also wanted to overcock the CPU to see what hidden performance lay within. By all accounts, he found the UD7 a pleasure to work with;

“We have a lot of experience with the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 motherboard and have always achieved great overclocked results with it. For this section of the review, we wanted to get the system stable to 4.6ghz so we could compare clock for clock against the Core i5 2500k and Core i7 2600k, on the next page.

The bios is really straightforward to use and due to the ‘no compromises’ design has fantastic power regulation and stability in an overclocked state.We changed the hardware thermal control to disabled. By adding another 0.100V we managed to get the system stable at 4.6ghz. As simple as that. It really is a testament to the quality of the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 that a 1 GHZ overclock is such a painfree process.”

What is also very encouraging is that having devised a healthy overclock of 1GHz, he opted to go back into BIOS and try and crank that clock speed just a little further:

“As we noted earlier in the review, hitting a clock speed of 4.6ghz only required a 0.100 voltage increase and a simple change of the multiplier. Achieving 4.8ghz required a little extra voltage – +0.125 according to the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD7 bios as shown above. We also changed the Load Line Control to the ‘extreme’ setting for complete stability. Until now we didn’t need to use this setting.

We think this is very impressive for air cooling and is around 400mhz better than we achieved with the last generation X6 1100T.”

Here’s the CPUz validation screen.

An overclock of 4.82GHz is pretty much the highest we’ve spotted on the web for the FX 8130 on air. Most other reviewers seemed to have faced stability issues crossing the 4.6GHz line, so of course we’re very proud to see our UD7 leading the pack in terms of overclocking performance. Off course, we also have to say hats off to Zardon for his efforts. For those of you wanting to try and replicate these results, our latest F6E version BIOS was used in the review, which you can download here.

Be sure to read the full review here.

Catch the 990FXA-UD7 board on our site here.