Overclocking
Though the M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 has Asus’ excellent TurboV, a hybrid hardware/software feature for overclocking in the Windows environment, I get my overclocking jollies in the BIOS, doing it the ol’ fashioned way. As most Asus motherboards, the board has “Level Up” overclocking, you choose a higher processor in the CPU’s product line and all settings are done automatically. I use it as a starting point, and do my tweaks from there.
The highest choice was 3.4gHz, and that overclock was easily accomplished. The last time I overclocked this processor I attained a clock of 3.8gHz, so I decided to go straight there, adding some CPU voltage in the process, but that clock speed was a little high.
After a significant amount of experimentation, I ended up with a stable clock of 3.63gHz…not quite the highest overclock with this processor, but a little higher than the 3.6gHz I normally got previous to the 3.8gHz one.
No overclocking of the NB, which (as we all should know) has an enormous effect on the performance of an OC’d AMD CPU. No overclocking of the on-board video. No comparison with the HD4200, which this system is supposed to be faster than… and usually isn’t.
I have this board, I have good luck with unlocking both cores of my 550BE. I’ve had really bad luck with fglrx driver stability under KDE, but I’m not the only one. I’ve finally reached stability using fglrx 10.6/10.7 (AMD couldn’t make up their mind which version it was, it was labeled as both point six and point seven on their website and the internal documentation, such is their attention to detail). Word is that 10.8 re-introduces KDE incompatibilities so I haven’t tried it.
Except for that and the occasional KIO crash when using USB 2.0 this board makes a good cheap Linux system with some future-proofing for the USB3 and SATA3 features (I’m using neither at the moment). If AMD would only adjust to the fact that KMS drivers are here and modern Linux desktops use ALL the fade effects and they are expected to work, this would actually be a very nice alternative to buying an Nvidia card for every Linux system built. As it is they are almost there. Maybe. Just fix fglrx, like all of it.