It's still early days with the biosses for our Asus Crosshair V platform. In total we had 3 biosses to work with : 0083, 0813 and 9905. The latter giving best performance of the three, though couldn't be used for the stock tests as the turbo didn't kick in accordingly ( this aparently caused due to using the EZ -Flash function as a reflash via AFUdos solved the issue ). If it kicked in at all on my test setup. But I got a 1-5% performance increase in some tests by just flashing this new bios. Yesterday (Oct 10th) I heard a rumour of a new AGESA code being released, maybe things can get further dialed in. This aside, back to the topic.

Anyone that has ever worked with an AMD CPU, knows that when overclocking the NorthBridge speeds, the platform becomes more efficient and powerfull. Time to see if this new CPU family still scales with increased NorthBridge speeds. Our FX-8150 runs stock at 11X multiplier so 200Ht clock x 11 = equals 2200Mhz NB speed. The FX8100, 6100 and 4100 run at 2000mhz NB speeds. The bios can clock all the way up to 3200Mhz in 200mhz increments. Upping Northbridge speeds usually coincides with increasing a similar called voltage.

We tried 2600Mhz first and tested it in our test suite. Adding voltage was not required. Next step 2800Mhz, a small bump in voltage was needed to allow it to post. However I never could get the system to succesfully boot into windows, if it didn't give me the blinking cursor on the screen first. (SandyBridge revisited ?)

Maybe still a bios limitation as AMD claims 3000mhz NB speed should be possible. Lets to get some cold into play to see if that would help. Dropping temps to around 0°C allowed me to get into Windows. Minus 50°C got me smooth with the 3200Mhz NB setting at 1.35NB voltage. Let's hope final retail silicon will allow to do this on air.

But how does it scale ? Comparing below stock 2200Mhz vs 2600 and 3200Mhz NB speeds.

All the results were done at 4.5Ghz, with 1600Mhz CL8-8-8-24 1T set for the rams. 1m is a very short test, but you can see a small gain to be observed, meaning the subsystem get's a little boost. The longer 32M test, gives a significant 19secs boost.

AIDA 64 Memory Bandwith test also shows the increase in ram bandwith due to upping the NB speed. How does it reflect in the other tests ?

The single core Cinebench test gave almost no increase. These are all average out of three results, rounded off to the highest value. The Multithreaded test however gains close to 700 points.

We tested 3 of futuremarks synthetic 3D tests. We did not include 3DMark11 as it's close to pure GPU performance once you reach a vertain CPU speed. Unigenes Heaven is even more GPU focussed, hence why you don't see such a test often in a Madshrimp CPU review.

Nice scaling again with higher NorthBridge speeds. Though as stated before, I hope final release silicon can do at least something around the 3000mhz mark on air. A lot will depend on your CPU cooling.

The game tests show that it all depends on the game taken. FarCry 2 is a nice scaler and also Mafia II seems to get a boost with higher NB Mhz. Crysis II Gamer setting is maxed out on the GTX 480 GPU.

On the next page we investigate CPU scaling under subzero cooling and some fun screenshots and last but not least a quick comparison Windows 7 vs Windows 8...