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
+1 EXACTLY my point! People KEEP bringing up fab sizes, but it is a simple TRUTH that a 3 year old 32 nm SandyBridge is FAR faster in nearly every conceivable way - at STOCK speeds no less!Apply a 4.7 GHz overclock (as my SandyBridge system has ) - and the Per Clock (as well as gaming performance!) actually BEATS my Haswell i7-5930K (which with the same Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO w/dual fans - is at a stable 4.4 Ghz) - in gaming!
Budburnicus - Wednesday, January 14, 2015 - link
*per CORE* - not clock (same IPC obviously)roadapathy - Monday, August 11, 2014 - link
In fact, I argued this point on my Steam Gamers group page and some said I was not fully understanding. I'll laugh a little about that because I talked with an employee of Intel at my work and he has a PhD in electrical engineering from Purdue. He said that I was correct and that the lithography makes a huge differences in power and performance of a CPU. Even if AMD CPUs/APUs are slower per IPC, it still does the job and it still costs much less to produce an entire PC system.Budburnicus - Wednesday, January 14, 2015 - link
Fab size isn't the problem here! A 3 year old i5-2500K or i7-2600K is built with a 32 nm fab and is only a 95 watt TDP part! On top of that, it is QUITE easy to overclock either to 4.7 GHz - and even then the power draw is at least 1/3 less and the CPU will be MUCH faster in EVERY way!Hell, at STOCK speeds, an i7-2600K is faster!
LarsBars - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
I wanted to build a Hyper-V lab for my work, so I ended up going with AMD FX. I don't care about overcook and the power consumption argument to me is not a big deal. I got my 8350 and 8320 on sale, and for the number of threads, the cache, and the hardware virtualization support, it was one of the cheapest ways to put together two 32 GB lab servers.Sttm - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
So this a fanboy only product? Not sure how anyone else can believe its a better purchase over an i7. Slower in most things, similar cost, multiple times the power usage.TiGr1982 - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
Well, for the unbiased customer there is indeed no sense in going with this FX rather than with i7.So, AFAIU, this is indeed a product for die-hard AMD fans. The only problem is that the number of these people is diminishing from year to year, I suppose.
darkich - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
What a terrible product.A 220W CPU now days?
Facepalm
gostan - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
I know AT team needs to eat. It's just painful to see them try so hard to be easy on AMD.darkich - Sunday, August 10, 2014 - link
+1