AMD Athlon X4 880K Review

👤by Tony Le Bourne Comments 📅18-08-16
Test Setup, Methodology & Overclocking
Test Setup
CPU AMD Athlon X4 880K, A10-7850K, A8-7650K, FX-8370, FX-8350
Cooling AMD WRAITH/near silent Thermal solution
Motherboard GIGABYTE G1-A88X Sniper
Memory AMD RADEON 2x 8GB DDR3 2400MHz
Graphics GIGABYTE AMD R9 280X
Storage HYPERX 3K 240GB
PSU NZXT HALE 650W


Benchmarks
Cinebench R15 – CPU Score
x264 HD 4.0 – 1st and 2nd pass encoding
SiSoftware SANDRA 2014 – CPU & Memory benchmarks
AIDA64 – CPU benchmarks
PCMark 8 – Home Suite
3DMark FireStrike – DX11 3D Benchmark
Games – Tomb Raider, THIEF


Other Software
CPU Specification Monitoring: CPU-Z
System Monitoring: AMD Overdrive, HWMonitor


Overclocking
Overclocking the 880K will be a breeze for most people depending on your motherboard. Using the unlocked multiplier to bump clock speeds will generally be the best bet for most, though you could play around with the turbo speeds also. The 880K had no problem booting in at 4.5GHz and 4.6GHz (multiplier of x46). Overclocking via the base clock will result in various other system changes and may result in 'banding' for other connected clocks such as the PCIe lanes. Though don't let this put you off from changing the Base Clock frequency. The Northbridge frequency is something worth looking at also, bumping it to 2000/2200MHz over the base 1800MHz could help improve performance with memory intensive operations.

A downside I discovered while playing with the Athlon chip is that it is rather HOT. I even swapped out the bundled cooler for the Noctua NH-U12S and the temperatures were still concerning. Sitting at 46 degrees stock and 57 degrees overclocked. At any OC setting benchmarks were subject to heavy throttling as temperatures soared to 83 degrees and that was only in Cinebench! (Maximum rated is 73.5) (the resulting score was a heavily throttled 214, nearly 100 pts less than it should be). So it would be fair to say that the overclocking potential is certainly there but the cooling required for a supposed 95W TDP CPU may be disproportionately larger/more expensive for optimal results.







Sitting in BIOS you can see the difference in temperatures between stock and overclock settings.


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