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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just4U - Sunday, August 10, 2014 - link
In my opinion the best cpu AMD has right now is A8 7600 coming in at $120 CAD. I see no reason to go Intel i3 as long as that puppy is there. (A argument can be made for Intel's AE 3x) The downside for AMD is I also see no reason why anyone should buy a more expensive CPU/APU from them.. their A-10 is priced in the same range as lower I5's which is a bit of a head shaker and their AM3+ is getting long in the tooth with no refresh.I could see a new FM2+ FX branded cpu priced at the tier their offering their A-10s for as it would bring something more to the table.. but they do really have to do something about single threaded performance. Even if it wasn't being used as much in programs their line-up takes a beating in reviews which is bad optics for them and leads to people like us (who read these things..) to suggest other alternatives for people buying/building a system.
FightApathy - Sunday, August 10, 2014 - link
237W operational power consumption. This is just.... terrible for a 2014 CPU. And what is even worse, is that i7 with 1/3 of TDP performs as well or even better. AMD has to stick to APUs.KAlmquist - Sunday, August 10, 2014 - link
"One could speculate that releasing the next generation of FX-85xx might put them behind the FX-9590 in performance, or that the fabrication process was not suitable for a quad-module CPU with the new architecture improvements."According to the Steamroller review, the 28nm bulk process that Steamroller was designed for won't clock as high as the 32nm SOI process that Piledriver uses. So an 8 core Steamroller processor would execute more instructions per clock, but would be clocked at least 400 Mhz slower, and as a result would be only marginally faster than Piledriver.
AMD is expecting to achieve another boost in instructions per clock with Excavator, but unless something has changed they plan to synthesize Excavator using software that minimizes die area at the cost of clock speed, so I'd expect Excavator to do more to improve performance per watt than to improve absolute performance.
After Excavator comes a completely new design, which we can hope will be a major improvement over the bulldozer derivatives.
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duploxxx - Monday, August 11, 2014 - link
funny to read all these replies. makes you wonder what avarage age and technology knowledge is of these tech sites.....All complaining about useless AMD and process tech but yet they don't understand that these own consumers are the ones to blame, they buy the jingle and bells and the marketing buzz... recent review on anandtech showed enough what was best to buy, yet most decide to buy the other marketing dominant brand as if there all day tasks are faster since the benchmarks show few percentage faster finished task... buyers need to blame themselve for there own stupid decisions. Want a fast system? get rid of Microsoft garbage. OEM-marketing kill the competition and consumers are the victim but they still dont understand it. (useless chipset revisions, socket changes, design rules like in ultrabook space and centrino, etc, etc..). poor consumers.
From a tech site you indeed need to review such a CPU, its mandatory but i don't think it gets the honor for what it supposed to be, anyhow there will be only few to sell since it has no reason to exist becide the mythical part.
I remember the days of pentium D and extreme, no reason at all to exist yet 1000's of buyers just for the brand....
duploxxx - Monday, August 11, 2014 - link
since no edit button :) thx anandtech asking that already for more then 10yI meant age and knowledge of the readers of course
Klimax - Monday, August 11, 2014 - link
Lovely nonsensical post. Including out of date bashing of Microsoft. 90s called, they want your nonsense back.Mugur - Monday, August 11, 2014 - link
There is still room for AMD in my home. I have 2 SB Core i3s for the gaming machines and I've just replaced an 80W Phenom II HTPC with an Intel NUC 2820. But my server (currently an Athlon II X4) will be soon an A10-7800 at 45W on a FM2+ with 8 SATA board...jgarcows - Monday, August 11, 2014 - link
How did you manage to post a review of a chip with a bundled retail liquid cooling system and not post a single picture of the liquid cooling system? How easy was it to install, what size openings are needed on the case, etc...LemmingOverlord - Monday, August 11, 2014 - link
May I suggest:a) some impressions on the liquid cooling? (+pics)
b) underclocking the CPU (and lowering voltage), then map that to power v. performance curves for the same set of benchmarks you ran... just to see how big a drop it would be in wattage.