Readers, beware, this is a somewhat lengthy post.
Right! So, those of you that were interested may remember my previous thread on this topic: Cooking with Chorizo where I overclocked my Athlon X4 845 on my Gigabyte F2A88X-UP4, with some interesting results. The synthetics were great, with the stock boost of 3.8ghz performing similarly to Richland/Trinity/Piledriver cores clocked almost a full gigahertz faster. However, when it came to gaming I noted that certain games, which had seemingly nothing in common, displayed sub-par performance due to some unexplainable throttling of the clockrate. (In particular, I had issues with Fallout 4, Company of Heroes 2, and Planetary Annihilation.) At first, I brushed this off as a side-effect of using a Beta BIOS, and when I inquired at the AMD forums, I was met with replies that told me much the same. Futhermore, they told me to contact Gigabyte.
And so I did.
The conversation I had with a Gigabyte representative took place of a period of time, and was nothing special. I submitted a ticket, and they replied back via e-mail. What followed was roughly a week and a half of exchanges where I provided BIOS Settings screenshots, images of my infrared thermometer displaying the temperatures of the VRM, images of my heatsinks, and, for funsies, some gameplay footage of how horrible the throttling/choking issue was. (I had provided much the same information at the AMD forums.) They were prompt with their replies, although I could tell English was not their first language (not necessarily a bad thing), and, the conversation ended with saying that the information would be forwarded to a test team and I would be updated on any findings. So, again, I was left in a nebula of uncertainty.
Over the past two months, between transitioning jobs and other boring adult things, I occasionally looked into the problem, to find any more information. Finally, I did, although the other person having the issue had an MSI motherboard. Still, he described the exact same issues as what I was having. This both gave me hope and irked me, because while my motherboard might still be fine, now my CPU was in question. To settle the issue, I decided to take the hit to the wallet and order the Asus A88XM-A/USB 3.1, which natively supported the Athlon X4 845. This wasn't entirely a spur-of-the-moment impulse - my father recently had one of his computers borkify. So this was a shameless excuse to scratch my tinkering itch, albeit at a $80 pricetag.
End result: I'm not too surprised to discovered that the CPU still throttles to ~2.5ghz while playing the exact same games. Comparing with some of the other gameplay footage I had taken, the experience seems more consistent in a positive way, but the problem persists. (And, come to think of it, this could be because of driver updates, or game-patches.)
Such is the price of being a tinkerer!