Overclocking our AMD A8 5600k processor was relatively painless although really struggled to hit 4.5GHz stable with an IGPU overclock of 950mhz but we think that's down to the lack of power phase available. Knowing our chip was capable we decided to plough on and at least try to get as close as we could to our target.

With our overclock target of 4.5GHz and 950MHz not obtainable, we decided to lower our expectations slightly and went for a slightly reduced clock speed of 4.4ghz. After changing the multiplier down to x44 and increased the graphics back up to 950MHz (which wouldn’t boot with 4.5GHz previously) we booted straight into windows first time. After running prime95 for 30 minutes just to check stability, we were happy with the results. Our main issue with the board was the lack of FSB control and we feel if we had been able to adjust this, our 4.5GHz target would have been possible. The board only comes with 4+2 power phases and it is Mini-ITX so we feel it did very well all things considered.

It has to be noted that this is a Mini-ITX board so we can’t fully compare it to a full sized ATX motherboard on overclocking performance alone. 4.4ghz is stll a huge improvement from stock and while we couldn’t hit our target, we are happy with what we achieved.

Our final clocks were 4392.16GHz on the CPU core and 950MHz on the GPU.