AMD FX-9590 AM3+ Processor Performance Review

By Hank Tolman

Manufacturer: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
Product Name: AMD FX-9590
Model Number: FD9590FHHKWOF
Price As Tested: $234.99 (Amazon | B&H | Newegg)

Full Disclosure: The product sample used in this article has been provided by AMD.

The newest installment of AMD FX CPUs is finally upon us. September 2014 marked the release of the a few new FX CPUs, including the FX-8370, the FX-8370E, and the FX-8320E. One of the side-effects of AMD’s release is a price drop in their existing CPUs, including the flagship FX-9590 CPU. In this article, Benchmark Reviews takes a look at the CPU that sits atop the FX line, the AMD FX-9590 AM3+ Processor.

The AMD FX-9590 packs a punch with 8 Piledriver cores running at a stock 4.7GHz and boosting up to a maximum 5GHz. With the release of the FX-8370 CPU, AMD has dropped the MSRP of the FX-9590 to $229. Although the new MSRP has been active for a few weeks, you may still have trouble finding the FX-9590 for that price. At the time of this writing, the FX-9590 still costs around $259. When the price does drop, AMD’s flagship processor, the FX-9590, will compete very closely in price with Intel’s i5-4670 CPU. Before we jump into a closer look at the FX-9590, let’s take a look at AMD’s current FX lineup.

Now let’s take a look at AMD’s top FX CPU.

The AMD FX-9590 CPU sits on top of the FX lineup of CPUs. As such, it touts the highest clock speeds of all of AMD’s FX series CPUs. The FX-9590 runs at 4.7GHz out of the box and has a maximum turbo clock speed of a massive 5GHz. The FX-9590 is, of course, a black edition CPU, so there may even be a little more headroom in there. This is especially true considering the fact that the CPU has been out for a while now and yields are certain to be higher and more stable.

The main difference in the FX-9000 series CPUs over the FX-8000 series CPUs is the RAM support. The FX-9590 and the FX-9370 support DDR3 RAM with speeds up to 2133MHz on a 990FX motherboard. The FX-8370 and the other FX-8000 series CPUs only support DDR3 RAM up to 1866MHz. You would undoubtedly be able to overclock your RAM using the FX-8000 series, but the higher native support sets the FX-9590 and FX-9370 a little apart from the rest of the series.

Considering the fact that the FX-8370, with a 4GHz clock speed, was recently released with an MSRP of $199, the price drop of the FX-9590 to $229 represents an excellent price point in my opinion. For only $30, the FX-9590 comes with the higher RAM support speed and 700MHz of extra oomph. Of course, you are looking at drawing about 95W more power with the FX-9590. The higher end FX-9000 series CPUs have a TDP of 220W, compared the 125W of the FX-8370 CPU. For that matter, the FX-8370E CPU, which demonstrated excellent overclocking capability and performance, sips a measly 95W of power.

Of course, it is my opinion that the customers who will be most interested in the FX-9590 probably won’t be as concerned about taking it easy in terms of power usage. AMD recommends using the FX-9590 with the high-end Radeon R9-290X series of video cards, which tend to suck up a lot of power as well. I know that, for me personally, if I’m going to go all out for my gaming rig, I’m not going to let 95 extra Watts of power to deter me.

So how do these processors stack up? Let’s find out.

With the recent drop in MSRP, the FX-9590 will actually compete in price very closely with the i5-4670. The i5-4670 currently costs $219, about $10 less than the FX-9590 MSRP. Keeping that in mind, I think the benchmarks do a good job of showing how the new AMD FX chips stack up against the competition in the all-important price to performance ratio.

In addition to the results for the Intel i5-4670 processor, I also included scores for the Steamroller based Kaveri A10-7850K APU, which I found to be an excellent value earlier this year. In fact, I liked how the Kaveri APUs stacked up enough to consider writing off the FX series completely. I think I’ll wait to pass judgement, however, until we see something other than a simple CPU refresh. I also included scores for the newly released FX-8370 and FX-8370E CPUs.

Since the FX processors don’t have an on-die graphics solution, I see no particular reason to include DX11 synthetic benchmarks or actual game benchmarks in the review. With that in mind, I focused on CPU-centric benchmarks to see how well the FX-9590 performs.

FM2+ Test System

• Motherboards: ASUS A88X Pro
• Processor: AMD A10-7850K
• System Memory: 8GB AMD Radeon DDR3 2400MHz
• Disk Drive: Seagate 1TB SSHD ST1000LM014
• PSU: Corsair CMPSU-850TX 850W 80-Plus Certified
• Video Card: XFX R9-280X
• Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Intel Test System

• Motherboard: Biostar HiFi Z87W
• Processor: Intel Core i5-4670
• System Memory: 8GB AMD Radeon DDR3 2400MHz
• Disk Drive: Seagate 1TB SSHD ST1000LM014
• PSU: Corsair CMPSU-850TX 850W 80-Plus Certified
• Video Card: XFX R9-280X
• Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

AMD 990FX Test System

• Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Killer
• Processors: AMD FX-8370; AMD FX-8370E; AMD FX-9590
• System Memory: 8GB AMD Radeon DDR3 2400MHz
• Disk Drive: Seagate 1TB SSHD ST1000LM014
• PSU: Corsair CMPSU-850TX 850W 80-Plus Certified
• Video Card: XFX R9-280X
• Operating System: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit

Compute Benchmarks

• AIDA 64
• SiSoftware Sandra 2014
• Cinebench R15

The Queen benchmark is a simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. The Photoworxx benchmark performs common photo and image editing tasks. The Queen benchmark seems to be made specifically for the AMD processors. They scale right up the list, with all of them thrashing the i5-4670; including the A10 APU. The Photoworxx tests bring things back into perspective and show a good estimation of processing that is very common today. In the Photoworxx test, the FX-8370E and the higher clocked FX-8370 both outpace the i5-4670, albeit by much slimmer margins than in the Queen test. The FX-8370 actually out-scores the FX-9590 CPU in the Photoworxx.

This integer benchmark measures combined CPU and memory subsystem performance through the public ZLib compression library. CPU ZLib test uses only the basic x86 instructions, and it is HyperThreading, multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core (CMP) aware. AMD has made great strides in the compression test over the last few processor revisions. In this case, the FX-9590, as well as the FX-8370E and FX-8370, all do very well compared to the i5-4670.

SiSoftware Sandra is a 32- and 64-bit client/server Windows system analyzer that includes benchmarking, testing and listing modules. It tries to go beyond other utilities to show you more of what is really going on under the hood so you draw comparisons at both a high and low-level in a single product. You can get information about the CPU, GPGPU, chipset, video adapter (GPU), ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals even .NET and Java.

The above tests show CPU bandwidth in GB/s for each of the associated tasks. The results of these tests were quite interesting. I would expect to see an increase in bandwidth on par with the increase in clock speed of the AMD processors. That doesn’t appear to be the case, however. I ran the tests over and over again trying to understand why the FX-9590 scores so poorly in the Encryption and Hash tests.

I still am not sure why this is the case, but in any event, the FX-9590 processor does score very well in the cryptography benchmark. It is difficult to pick out a winner here, due to the fluctuations, but they all perform quite closely.

CINEBENCH is a cross-platform testing suite that measures hardware performance and is the de facto standard benchmarking tool for leading companies and trade journals for conducting real-world hardware performance tests. With the new Release 15, systems with up to 256 threads can be tested. CINEBENCH is available for both Windows and OS X and is used by almost all hardware manufacturers and trade journals for comparing CPUs and graphics cards.

PCMark 8 is designed to be an extremely realistic benchmark that takes actual tasks that are commonly used in different environments and testing them, then compiling the results and assigning a score. During the PCMark 8 tests, worksheets and documents are opened, edited, and saved. Music and videos are played. Video conferencing is simulated. An internet browser is opened and runs through a series of pages and requests. The tests cover the gamut of tasks that are commonly associated with home use, work use, and creativity based usage.

One of the advantages that the AMD processors had in this particular test was their ability to use the R9-280X GPU and OpenCL to help out. This is, in part, the very beginnings of what AMD envisions in their heterogeneous compute future. Whether that is the sole reason that the AMD FX-8370 and FX-8370E outpace the i5-4670 in the home and creative suites is up for interpretation. Even with the OpenCL support, the i5 still pulls out a win in the work suite.

IMPORTANT: Although the rating and final score mentioned in this conclusion are made to be as objective as possible, please be advised that every author perceives these factors differently at various points in time. While we each do our best to ensure that all aspects of the product are considered, there are often times unforeseen market conditions and manufacturer changes which occur after publication that could render our rating obsolete. Please do not base any purchase solely on our conclusion, as it represents our product rating specifically for the product tested, which may differ from future versions. Benchmark Reviews begins our conclusion with a short summary for each of the areas that we rate.

AMD has long controlled the value portion of the sub-$200 processor market. Though the FX series is the latest iteration, the Phenom and Phenom-II processors before it also held down an excellent price to performance ratio, demonstrating the viability of AMD processors. The newest refresh of the FX series, the FX-8370E and FX-8370 CPUs show nothing different, especially in multi-threaded performance. The FX-9590 still sits at the top of it’s market, showing great performance beyond similarly priced processors. That being said, the FX-8370 does well competing with the FX-9590 and doesn’t cost as much.

The AMD FX-9590 didn’t overclock much for me. It ran at 5.0GHz on all cores, but that’s as high as I got it to go. Considering that 5.0GHz is the max turbo speed, I wasn’t really impressed. That was even running with a water cooler. I suppose that the FX-9590 is at the very top of the yields, so there probably isn’t much room for pushing the envelope. I’d have like to see something more, though.

The simply fact that AMD can continue to release new versions of the same CPUs with slightly higher clock speeds while lowering prices across the board is a testament to their high level of construction and the quality of materials used. The yields must continue to improve, because we are going on two years of Piledriver based FX chips at this point. The real question that this brings up, of course, is the value of the FX-9590 over the FX-8370. While the FX-9590 only has an MSRP $27 higher than the FX-8370, the two CPUs are very similar, and perform very closely. The FX-8370 may even have a little more headroom, meaning it might be able to overclock and perform just as well as the FX-9590

The FX series of processors represents a small part of the huge branding efforts of AMD. You can practically build an entire gaming PC out of parts from AMD or manufacturing partners. In our testbench, the Chipset on the motherboard is made by AMD, as is the CPU, the GPU, and the RAM. You can also get an AMD SSD to go along with the rest, leaving nothing but the PSU up to the another company. This is a testament of the functionality of the FX CPUs. AMD has the ability to fine tune performance together with every other component to ensure an excellent experience across the board. I’ve said the same about Samsung’s completely in-house manufactured SSDs recently. It is true for them, and it is true for AMD.

At the time of this publishing, the AMD FX-9590 processor is selling online for $234.99 (Amazon | B&H | Newegg). That’s actually closer to $50 or $55 more than the FX-8370. In this instance, I have to give the value to the FX-8370, and not so much to the FX-9590.

Pros:

Cons:

– The FX-8370 might be a better value
– Still using old cores

• Performance: 8.50
• Overclock: 7.00
• Construction: 9.00
• Functionality: 9.00
• Value: 7.50