AMD's Kaveri K Series APUs have a wealth of untapped performance potential: out of the box they come with a modest 720MHz GPU core clock speed, yet anyone who has toyed with AMD APUs in the past knows there's going to be a lot of overclocking headroom. Before we progress any further I?m going to make my intentions with this article clear ? AMD's Kaveri APU is about the GPU and that's where our focus lays today. Sure you can overclock the CPU, but because the CPU and GPU are combined, overclocking the CPU reduces the thermal and power headroom of the GPU, and vice versa. Not to mention that the GPU offers the most potential for performance scaling whereas the CPU doesn't offer anywhere near as much ? so picking the CPU over the GPU will leave you with less performance than if you?d have picked the GPU. Picking only the GPU for overclocking also makes sense as the A10-7850K is primarily designed to be a gaming chip, and a chip that takes advantage of GPU acceleration, so overclocking the CPU with detriment to the GPU makes no sense at all. How does the CPU have the potential to detriment the GPU you might ask? Well it is quite simple ? the CPU produces more heat and uses more power than the GPU so overclocking it is likely to lead to thermal throttling of the entire APU package. With regards to TDP/power-based throttling you can get around this by disabling AMD's APM (Application Power Management) but you still have the heat issue to contend with. Therefore for the purposes of this article we?re going with a GPU overclock only. For those interested in overclocking the CPU you?re better off waiting for the standalone Steamroller based Athlon CPUs to hit the FM2+ socket, or going with existing FX and Athlon series AMD CPUs.