CPU Testing Methodology

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