14 DAY TRIAL // It hasn't been more than a few days since the overclocking of AMD's Trinity accelerated processing unit to 7.31 GHz, yet already the claim is being made that the same processor has been pushed higher than that.
Micro-Star International, using its FM2-A85XA-G65 mainboard, succeeded in pushing the A10-5800K APU to 7.384 GHz, as seen in the CPUZ validation here.
As one might guess, liquid nitrogen was used in order to keep the heat from melting the circuits in and around the CPU and its socket.
That makes the overclocking session quite different from the one involving Intel's Core i7 3770K, which employed liquid helium and “only” achieved 7.184 MHz on an ASUS Z77 OC Formula motherboard.
Alas, this doesn't mean much for us, normal customers, who will never try overclocking anything. While the GPU in the A-Series is powerful, the processor cores are weaker than Intel's, so it's still the price that will decide the success of the desktop APUs. It's a good thing they're so low.