AMD A8-3870K - Radeon HD 6550D Graphics

Strangely, when attempting to overclock the Radeon HD 6550D graphics on the A8-3870K for testing under Linux, it failed. With the latest BIOS for the Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 motherboard, the GPU core clock was raised above 600MHz from the BIOS. When doing so, however, the OverDrive output from the AMD Catalyst Linux driver did not reflect any change in frequency -- whether it was 602MHz, 700MHz, or any other value.

When running some benchmarks, there did not appear to be any differences to reflect the higher GPU clock. When attempting to alter the GPU clock of the 6550D using "aticonfig" with the OverDrive arguments, the frequencies were rejected. This matter is still being investigated, but as a result, with the benchmarks in this article the Radeon HD 6550D graphics were at the stock frequency, but the A8-3870K was tested at 3.0GHz and 3.6GHz.