AMD’s 5 GHz Turbo CPU in Retail: The FX-9590 and ASRock 990FX Extreme9 Review
by Ian Cutress on August 9, 2014 8:00 AM ESTCPU Benchmarks: Comparing Motherboards
Readers of our motherboard review section will have noted the trend in modern motherboards to implement a form of MultiCore Enhancement / Acceleration / Turbo (read our report here) on their motherboards. This does several things – better benchmark results at stock settings (not entirely needed if overclocking is an end-user goal), at the expense of heat and temperature, but also gives in essence an automatic overclock which may be against what the user wants. Our testing methodology is ‘out-of-the-box’, with the latest public BIOS installed and XMP enabled, and thus subject to the whims of this feature. It is ultimately up to the motherboard manufacturer to take this risk – and manufacturers taking risks in the setup is something they do on every product (think C-state settings, USB priority, DPC Latency / monitoring priority, memory subtimings at JEDEC). Processor speed change is part of that risk which is clearly visible, and ultimately if no overclocking is planned, some motherboards will affect how fast that shiny new processor goes and can be an important factor in the purchase.
Point Calculations – 3D Movement Algorithm Test: link
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores.
Compression – WinRAR 5.0.1: link
Our WinRAR test from 2013 is updated to the latest version of WinRAR at the start of 2014. We compress a set of 2867 files across 320 folders totaling 1.52 GB in size – 95% of these files are small typical website files, and the rest (90% of the size) are small 30 second 720p videos.
Image Manipulation – FastStone Image Viewer 4.9: link
FastStone is the program I use to perform quick or bulk actions on images, such as resizing, adjusting for color and cropping. In our test we take a series of 170 images in various sizes and formats and convert them all into 640x480 .gif files, maintaining the aspect ratio. FastStone does not use multithreading for this test, and results are given in seconds.
The FX-8150 result for the Extreme9 compared to other motherboards shows one of two things - the latest Windows SP1 with core parking updates has an effect, or the BIOS is more efficient at handling turbo modes than our older reviews.
Video Conversion – Handbrake v0.9.9: link
For HandBrake, we take two videos (a 2h20 640x266 DVD rip and a 10min double UHD 3840x4320 animation short) and convert them to x264 format in an MP4 container. Results are given in terms of the frames per second processed, and HandBrake uses as many threads as possible.
Rendering – PovRay 3.7: link
The Persistence of Vision RayTracer, or PovRay, is a freeware package for as the name suggests, ray tracing. It is a pure renderer, rather than modeling software, but the latest beta version contains a handy benchmark for stressing all processing threads on a platform. We have been using this test in motherboard reviews to test memory stability at various CPU speeds to good effect – if it passes the test, the IMC in the CPU is stable for a given CPU speed. As a CPU test, it runs for approximately 2-3 minutes on high end platforms.
Synthetic – 7-Zip 9.2: link
As an open source compression tool, 7-Zip is a popular tool for making sets of files easier to handle and transfer. The software offers up its own benchmark, to which we report the result.
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Budburnicus - Wednesday, January 14, 2015 - link
Umm, it is QUITE possible to get a SandyBridge to 5 GHz, in fact I have my i7-2600K rock stable at 4.7 GHz (where my Haswell i7-5930k is 4.4) - and it TOTALLY SPANKS this POS FX 9590! Less power, same clock speed, MUCH higher performance!AT is being TOO EASY on AMD, not too harsh! This CPU is not a "win" in any sense!
bebimbap - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
No matter what any one that loves this FX-9590 says, this processor is just an exercise in gluttony, and devolution.I have been spoiled by computer evolution. coming from the commodore/Macintosh/SX286 days. you appreciate a few things. such as noise/heat/size reduction of modern systems.
50-80w cpus are quiet, compared to the pentium4 days.... or Hairdryer days...
SSDs are silent,
modern HDDs are basically silent, compared to 40MB drives and 3.5/5.25 floppies and don't forget the stack of floppies you had in the drawer instead of a single USB stick.
modern gpus not oc'd are quiet, still remember the hiss of my gforce3Ti
CRTs - actually have a noise when you turn them on, some buzz when in use... and don't forget the size.
case- you either had a monster of a case that would break your table if you put it on it, or a fugly thing that you wanted to hide under the table.
overall the heat produced compared to a 19" crt + pentium4/thoroughbred + 9800XT compared to a modern system also let you get rid of the window AC unit reducing a lot of noise.
so i am spoiled because i can now have a system where i'm not sweating like a pig and going deaf while playing my favorite game or browsing the web. I don't need a 1000w speaker system to hear the gunshots clearly over my cpu/gpu/psu fans or window AC unit.
I no longer need a computer be a 4in1 device that acts as a heater, a LOUD white noise generator, an air filter, and computer. It should be similar to a BMW-M5, everyday comfort and driveability but grunt when you want it, but of course with better fuel economy.
Leyawiin - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
This article makes me feel good about the FX-6300 @ 4.5 Ghz I have. At least with the games they chose to benchmark I'm doing fine.siberus - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
Any chance we could get some testing with radeon gpu's using mantle ? :) would be pretty neat to see how some of the older/lower tiered cpu's break down. Unless you guys have done something like that already in another article then I apologize for asking.monstercameron - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
this cpu just chew through integer workloads, faster than a 4770k, where it fails is every thing else. I reckon a well optimized program written directly[fma?] for it would haul ass!resination - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
This is THE processor for the "rolling coal" set.CSammy - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
Pathetic. The cover might as well be Intel pissing on this AMD processor, because that is quite literally the truth in nearly every single aspect.TiGr1982 - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
Note that there is no recent Devil's Canyon Core i7-4790K here - this one, being around 13% faster than i7-4770K in CPU-bound tasks, would make the FX to look even less relevant.TheinsanegamerN - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
"AMD clearly does care about the performance market"yeah, thats why they couldnt even be bothered to use the new kaveri cores, instead rehashing an old piledriver cpu with higher clocks and a TDP that puts netburst to shame. all the while, performing sligtly slower then a intel cpu with a third the tdp and running 1.5 GHz slower.
They care about the performance market so much, that they put this chip on the 3 year old AM3+ platform, rather than the new FM2+ platform, just so we can use old chipsets with feature sets from 2011.
And it costs as much as a core i7.
CLEARLY, AMD still cares about the performance market.
TiGr1982 - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
I perfectly understand your sarcasm :)I guess, it was something like that: AMD did not and does not have the resources and/or desire to invest into pure many-module CPUs beyond Piledriver FX CPU. So, from the engineering standpoint, they stopped there.
But then the marketing stepped in and said: "We need a faster CPU to brag. Because we aren't developing a new one, can you boost the current one?" And the engineering team said "Yes... Okay...". And they did. :)