Turbo Unlocker

The Turbo Unlocker allows you to get the most out of your Black Edition or X6 AMD chip by providing a performance boost. It does this by raising the CPU core ratio of the core that is under load, thus meaning less cores for particular application use and more gain in performance can be achieved. So with the AMD X6 chip I am currently using, the ratio will notch up from 14 to 16. 14 being the maximum available without Turbo Unlocker enabled.

Turbo Key II

With Turbo Key II we are able to overclock the system by the flick of a switch. The process is automated, this makes overclocking possible for those who are not as confident at tackling such a task. It's quite a handy tool, it should encourage those who are perhaps lack in self-belief to get put them onto the first stepping stone to tinkering hardware performance. Sure enough, you may not be manually altering certain aspects of the system to get performance gains but the results should be noticable, and could tease you to have a go yourself.



Overclocking

The M4A89TD PRO is said to be a step down from the Crosshair IV, hosting such a great chipset as the 890FX and a glorious array of heatsinks this board was built with performance in mind. Stock performance is all very good but if you are investing in a motherboard of such calibre you surely want to tweak system performance and get the most out of your components and so it is in your best interest to overclock.

For this overclocking exercise, I simply disabled some of the settings in CPU Configuration such as 'Cool n' Quiet' C1 configuration and turned AI Overclock Tuner to 'Manual' notched the CPU Bus Frequency up - made sure the DRAM freqency was below stock parameters (so that we don't head into instability) and finally modified the CPU voltage accordingly.

Whilst I didn't want to spend massive amounts of time overclocking, I did want to establish a good overclock and without too much hassle I managed to get to 3.5GHz. The settings were CPU ratio - 14 CPU Bus Frequency to 250, memory to 1333MHz and CPU Voltage to 1.45.

Test Setup

AMD X6 1055T (2.8GHz)
ASUS M4A89TD PRO (890FX)
4GB (2x2GB) GeIL Black Dragon DDR3 1800MHz
MSI 8800GTX 898MB
500GB Samsung Spinpoint SATA-II
Enermax Revolution85+ 850W

Testing Suite

Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Everest Ultimate
Cinebench
3DMark Vantage x64
SiSoftware SANDRA 2009
Street Fighter IV Benchmark