A 260MHz system bus overclock is good for AMD chipsets, and with more voltage tweaking it could be possible to overclock even further. As always results may vary from system to system. Next up, power draw measurements and PCSTATS test system specs... then it's on to benchmarks!

BIOS Options:

There aren't a huge amount of surprises to be found in the Biostar TA890FXE's BIOS, but it does give you the ability to tweak and tune most of the major system settings if you're an overclocker.

The overclock engine lets you decide on the level of overclocking you want. Biostar uses an engine analogy for its tuning which may not be totally accurate for CPU overclocking, but I'm not going to complain as long as it increases system speed.

Core leveling is Biostar's term for AMD's TurboCore boosting, the dynamic core frequency adjustment. It can be enabled or disabled at a BIOS system on the TA890FXE. If you own an AMD triple core processor (based on a four-core design) or an AMD four core processor (based on a six-core design), you may be able to unlock the hidden processor cores using Biostar's Bio-unlocKING tool. Obviously the success of this tool will vary from chip to chip, but if you can get some easy and free performance out of a less expensive AMD processor, more power to you!

To do serious overclocking it's often necessary to adjust system voltages manually, and the TA890FXE allows for this in its Over Voltage Configuration window.

Finally, you can manually set CPU settings and voltages if you're overclocking directly from the BIOS. If you have a Black Edition processor you can also overclock by adjusting the system multiplier upwards.

Now let's move on with the benchmarks!