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 ESTASRock 990FX Extreme9 BIOS
For those that have followed our Z87 and Z97 BIOS coverage, the ASRock BIOS for the 990FX Extreme9 falls very much on the side of Z87, which makes sense as the platform will probably not be seeing many updates, if any, for the foreseeable future. The main screen uses white text on a starry background, with the selected option very clearly defined.
In this main screen we have details of the motherboard name, the BIOS version, the CPU installed, the CPU Speed, the DRAM installed, the per-module density and the current speed of each module. Other information that would be good to have includes the main system voltages, temperatures and fan speeds. Note that ASRock has not yet implemented a system that contains this information across every BIOS screen, unlike some of their competition. On this screen is also an ‘Active Page on Entry’, useful for overclockers that want the BIOS to skip straight into the OC Tweaker menu.
The OC Tweaker menu, as the name suggests, has the overclocking options. ASRock like to add in some automatic overclock options, and here we get the choice from a 5% to a 50% overclock:
Typically the higher overclocks would be outlined in red to indicate an extreme overclock, but ASRock does not do that here. The rest of the OC Tweaker menu has the CPU configuration settings, DRAM Timing options and Voltage configuration. Load Line Calibration is a single option in the voltage section, and the DRAM Timing Control is a separate menu item for memory sub-timings:
The Advanced tab contains options for enabling/disabling controllers, adjusting SATA modes and implementing some power saving features. The Tool menu next is where ASRock has their more interesting features, such as System Browser that gives an overview of the motherboard and tells the user what is installed:
The Online Management Guard feature displays a timetable for the week and allows the user to disable the network features. One of the major purposes of this feature is for adults to restrict their children’s use of the internet at odd hours of the day.
The Dehumidifier function keeps fans enabled after the system has switched off in order to equilibrate the temperature inside the case with the temperature outside the case. In the event of warm, moist air in the case that cools in the evening, in humid climates this may cause condensation, hence this feature. There are also menu options to save user profiles within the BIOS underneath this setting.
The Fan Controls are how ASRock used to do them, in terms of ‘levels’, with the higher the level indicating how quickly the CPU fan power would ramp up. Some of the headers have the option of tying the fan power to the CPU temperature, meaning that if the CPU temperature rises above a value, the fan is placed on full speed until the target temperature is reached.
The BIOS finishes up with boot options and security. One missing feature from ASRock BIOSes is a boot override feature, allowing for a one-time boot from within the BIOS.
ASRock 990FX Extreme9 Software
The software for the Extreme9 is centered around the ASRock Extreme Tuning Utility, or AXTU for short. AXTU used to be the main interface, until A-Tuning came about for Intel’s 8-series motherboards, but due to the age of the motherboard (or perhaps incompatibilities) this software has not been upgraded.
The screen that pops up first with AXTU is the Hardware Monitor interface. This shows the CPU speeds, base frequencies and multipliers, as well as the fan speeds, temperatures and voltages. Two key bits of information missing are the CPU installed and the motherboard which is being used.
AXTU also is part of the fan control:
The fan controls here are similar to that in the BIOS, relying in the ‘level’ system to determine the gradient at which the fan speed is ramped up. Users can select a target temperature which will put the fan at full speed when the CPU is above the target.
The overclocking interface offers several simple options, although no automatic overclocking setups. Here we can adjust the base frequencies, the multipliers and the voltages, although nothing along the lines of load-line calibration.
AXTU also provides an interface to save the BIOS and some power saving features, but also XFast RAM. This feature allows the user to partition off some of the memory into a RAMDisk, and AXTU will also manage some caching options in order to speed up some of the operating system functions.
While ASRock has dropped XFast USB with the latest Intel 9-series motherboards, the software is here on the Extreme9 and implements newer USB protocols to increase peak transfer speeds at the expense of latency. In our copy tests, the XFast feature does provide a tangible benefit, although the feature is limited to one USB device at a time.
XFast LAN is a licensed and skinned version of cFos, which allows for software manipulation of network priority.
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Sushisamurai - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
I think you guys are a little too harsh. The architecture was developed 2012-2013, so realistically, this is a sandy bridge/ivy bridge comparison. If you were to OC an ivy bridge/sandy bridge to this performance, you'd be looking at similar wattage (I'm guessing here, 5GHz on ivy/sandy doesn't seem possible on CLC). The fact it comes close to haswell for a year or two old part, I consider that a winDaniel Egger - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
Who cares when it was developed to do a comparison. They release it today so it has to compare against todays CPUs and this one sucks on so many levels it's not even funny anymore. Also no sane person cares about clock, it's either single- or multithread performance plus sometimes iGPU performance and of course efficiency, if you want crazy clocks you can dig out some Netburst Pentiums... Last but not least if you desperately want to see this PoC loose in some benchmarks against some mainstream Sandy Bridge CPU then have a look at the graphs and check for "Core i5-2500K".TiGr1982 - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
Indeed, clocks comparison does not work in terms of performance comparison between different microarchitectures.One simple number:
Haswell in single thread is around 70% faster (~1.7 times) than Piledriver (say, in Cinebench 1 thread) at the same clocks. ~70%. Check yourself. Nuff said.
Fouquin - Sunday, August 10, 2014 - link
Except they didn't release it today, they released it 14 months ago. So really, it's still an IB - FX comparison. AT was just really slow to put any press on this chips existence. It has no purpose other than to show the limit of the Bulldozer architecture, and it does that quite nicely. (Although I have an FX-8350 running at 5.12, so it isn't even the upper limits.)Really when it comes down to it though, it's a "for fun" chip. Like a super-car: it looks and acts fast, costs way too much, sucks down gas by the gallon, and is complete excess to your needs. But hey, it's shiny and looks good in the garage.
TiGr1982 - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
In fact, Sandy Bridge is much more efficient and has much higher IPC than Piledriver. So, Sandy Bridge i7 Core i7-2600K/2700K has to be overclocked around 4.3 GHz to match or surpass FX-9590. Ivy Bridge has slightly better IPC, than Sandy, so that 4.1-4.2 GHz should suffice for Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K to match or surpass FX-9590. And this is for full multithreading.For single threading, Sandy and Ivy are already faster at stock turbo frequencies than anything Piledriver can offer. Piledriver has to be clocked beyond 6 GHz to try to match Core i7 stock single thread (LN2 may help, actually :)).
Yes, single-threaded performance is not so important these days, as many people like to point out, but lack of single-threaded performance is still a considerable drawback.
Sushisamurai - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
Yes, I realized clock to clock comparison doesn't really work - it would work if IPC was similar between different micro architectures... and well... I was over simplifying things. But, on the benchmarks, this FX core does seem to catch up to the i7-2500.My main point was to emphasize that this CPU has been around for a while, and was only recently "released" to the general public as opposed to OEM's. Had this been available when it was developed, it might have made a bigger difference for AMD - which could have potentially kept them in the CPU race.
TiGr1982 - Saturday, August 9, 2014 - link
Well, to make a bigger difference, it had to be WIDELY released a year ago (say, around initial Haswell release) for, say, $250-280 (and not $350) for retail, and be supported immediately with at least 5-7 new MOBOs capable of working with 220W TDP out of the box. Since it did not happen, now it is maybe "too little, too late" - especially, considering the facts, that:1) Devil's Canyon Core i7-4790K is already on sale, and it costs the same $$$ as last year's Core i7-4770K. Core i7-4790K is even further ahead of FX-9590 in terms of performance at stock (4.0-4.4 Ghz) and i7-4790K is even a little further overclockable to around 4.5-4.6 GHz with no issues, and FX-9590 is actually not.
2) Haswell-E is coming, and the cheapest Haswell-E, rumored to be Core i7-5820K, is supposed to have 6 Haswell cores and cost something around $400. This is of course worth thinking about for the people getting/building a new desktop machine.
mapesdhs - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
Alas AFAIK the 5820K is a 4-core. 5930K is 6-core, 5960X is 8-core.
Ian.
TiGr1982 - Wednesday, August 13, 2014 - link
Not really; so far, all the sources point that Core i7-5820K will be 6 core - unlike Core i7-4820K and Core i7-3820 before it.mapesdhs - Tuesday, August 12, 2014 - link
SB is such a nice chip. Every 2700K I've obtained has happily run at 5GHz no problem,takes just a few minutes on a board like the ASUS M4E/Z. Built five of them so far. And
unlike the latest HW, it won't throttle because the temps are still good.
Ian.