AMD FX-9590 The AMD FX-9590 is an eight-core, overclock-ready processor that offers some of the best performance available, provided you have the requisite hardware.

AMD FX-9590

  • Pros

    Can be overclocked. Ideal for optimized media-crunching tasks. Price is reasonable.

  • Cons

    Still lags in single-core tests. Uses much more power than comparable Intel chips, which also have on-chip graphics. Limited motherboard support and extra cooling costs.

  • Bottom Line


For about a year, from mid-2013 to mid-2014, AMD's FX-9590 processor was priced at or close to $1,000—that is, if you could find one to buy outside of a custom-built boutique PC. That put the chip—and its impressively high 4.7GHz to 5GHz stock clock speed—outside of the price range of most enthusiasts.

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Plus, even if you were ready to drop that much cash on a CPU, it was clear that even with eight cores and the fastest out-of-the-box clock speed of any consumer-focused CPU, the FX-9590's performance wasn't quite on par with Intel's similarly priced Extreme Edition CPUs, like 2014's Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition or the then-current Core i7-4960X. It was something of a poster chip for why clock rate isn't the be-all and end-all for choosing a CPU.

Image: AMD FX-9590 (Chip Upright).jpg

All that, combined with the fact that the chip essentially demands liquid cooling, made the FX-9590 a high-priced niche processor for the most loyal of AMD fans, the most adventurous PC builders, or spec geeks who crave high clock speeds above everything else. (The liquid-cooling needs are due to its 220-watt thermal design power, or TDP, rating, which is more than 2.5 times that of similar-performing Intel chips.)

The FX-9590 equation changed, however, in mid-2014, when AMD decided to drop the chip's price precipitously, to a much more reasonable $229.99 MSRP. (When we wrote this, it was selling for that price or a bit more;, for example, had it for $260, bundled with an AMD-branded liquid cooler.) This, along with the introduction of a pair of new chips a step down from the FX-9590 (the FX-8370 and a lower-powered FX-8370E), has breathed some new life into the FX platform, which has been more or less dormant for the past couple of years. Around the same time, MSI even decided to release a new (and fairly impressive) gaming-focused FX motherboard, in the form of the under-$100 MSI 970 Gaming, which we reviewed alongside this chip.

We tested the FX-9590 in that very motherboard, partially because the two were sent our way together, but also because many other existing AMD FX-based boards simply don't support the sky-high power needs of the FX-9590. As a result of that, if you have an older FX-based motherboard, there's a strong chance you'll need to upgrade the board, as well, if you opt for this chip. You'll want to look for specific mention that a given FX board can handle this fire-breather of a chip.

Odds are you'll need to spring for a new CPU cooler, too. We initially tested the FX-9590 with a compact, self-contained liquid cooler that we've used on several CPUs in the past (the Antec Kühler H20 620). But after getting poor benchmark results—some below the numbers we've seen from lesser chips in the FX line—and doing some digging, we discovered that the FX-9590 was throttling due to insufficient cooling. And that on water-cooling!

Image: AMD FX-9590 (Box).jpg

It was only after we mounted on a bigger, more robust water-cooler, the Deepcool Maelstrom 240 Gamer Storm (a self-contained liquid cooler, with a larger 240mm, dual-fan radiator), that the chip performed to its best abilities. And keep in mind, this was at stock speeds.

As a result, this chip is a beast if you look at the price of the chip alone, but it comes with a big caveat: the cost of supporting hardware. While AMD's now-much-lower price boosts the FX-9590's appeal big-time, when you factor in the cost of the new motherboard and radiator that you're likely to need with it, it might not be quite as affordable as it seems.


We've been over the FX-series' background and architecture in some of our earlier FX-chip reviews, so refer to those for more of that nitty-gritty, if that's of interest. At a basic level, though, shoppers should be clear about one fundamental difference between the FX line and Intel's first-through-fourth-generation mainstream Core processors: The FX chips are processors only, lacking on-chip graphics.

The comparable Intel Core processors, on the other hand, are integrated with Intel's HD Graphics of various flavors, which can be a cost-saver if the system you're building does not need a dedicated graphics card. AMD, of course, has its own set of combined CPU/GPUs: its extensive A and E series of chips, which it dubs "APUs" (its own term for combined CPU/GPU chips, or "accelerated processing units"). One might argue that the closer Intel analogue to the FX series is the company's pricey Socket 2011 processors (topped, as we write this, by the various "Extreme Edition" chips, such as the Core i7-5960X). The Socket 2011 chips are also CPU-only, but they (and the platform as a whole) are more expensive than the FX-9590. The thing that both platforms have in common, though: You'll need to factor in the cost of a dedicated video card to use with either platform.

Rather than rattle off a list of specs for all of AMD's current eight-core FX CPUs, here's a handy comparison chart, directly from the company…

Image: AMD FX-9590 (8-Core CPUs).jpg

These chips are still based on the Piledriver architecture, which was found in the FX-8350 and other FX models that have been around since 2012. And that means even the eight-core FX-8350 has a fairly high TDP of 125 watts—far above the 80-watt range of Intel's comparable current-gen chips. The FX-9590's 220-watt TDP is much higher than even that of Intel's eight-core, 16-thread Extreme Edition Core i7-5960X. (That mega-chip, which debuted in mid-2014, has a TDP of "only" 140 watts.)

Those looking for a new FX processor from AMD with power requirements more in line with comparable Intel chips do have options, though. Two new-in-2014 chips have 95-watt TDPs: the FX-8370E (included in the performance charts to follow) and the FX-8320E (not tested).

Performance Testing

Aside from the higher clock speed and power requirements, there's not a whole lot "new" with the FX-9590—or any of the 2014 additions to the FX line, really. You'll still be using a 900-series chipset motherboard—one that expressly advertises support for the FX-9000-series CPUs—and the same AM3+ socket as before. Given that there's really not much else to talk about, we'll soon dive into the benchmarks.

The FX-9590 has a 4.7GHz core clock speed, which can step up to an impressive-sounding 5GHz automatically at certain times, when all cores aren't being taxed. At the time of its debut, that was the basis for AMD's claim of this being the "first 5GHz processor," and much of the buzz around the chip was based on that. In our tests, the FX-9590 breezed past the lower-clocked FX-8370 on most of our benchmark tests. But in bench tests that don't take full advantage of all possible cores, Intel's $190 Core i5-4570 generally did better. (That Core i5 chip is fairly representative of the four-core CPUs in the middle of Intel's 4th-Gen/Haswell line.) Plus, Intel's Core i7-4790K "Devil's Canyon" chip, while admittedly a bit pricier (around $300, at this writing), decisively outperformed the FX chip on the same tests, while drawing a lot less power.

Like most high-end AMD chips, the FX-9590 is unlocked for easy overclocking. But considering it took a double-wide, self-contained liquid cooler to keep our test chip running at top speed at stock clock settings, you probably don't want to think about overclocking the FX-9590 unless you've got a very impressive cooling setup (and a lot of patience).

Cinebench 11.5 and R15

In Cinebench 11.5, an industry-standard benchmark test that taxes all available CPU cores to measure raw CPU muscle, the FX-9590 looked reasonably good…

Image: AMD FX-9590 (Cinebench).jpg

Pushing close to a score of 8 Cinebench units, it came in well ahead of Intel's Core i5-4570, and a reasonable distance ahead of the other AMD chips. But the costlier Core i7-4790K did much better here.

In the newest version of Cinebench, the FX-9590 performed similarly, relative to the rest…

Image: AMD FX-9590 (Cinebench R15).jpg

Media-Conversion Tests

In our real-world media-crunching tests, the results we saw were mixed for the FX-9590. In our Sony Vegas Pro 8 tests, which are optimized to take advantage of all cores, the FX-9590 slightly outpaced the lesser AMD FX chips, but it was bested by Intel's Core i5 and i7 chips…

Image: AMD FX-9590 (Sony Vegas Pro).jpg

We saw similar results when we switched to our Windows Media Encoder test. This is an older test, so while it does take advantage of multiple cores, it isn't written to fully tax all cores.

Here, the FX-9590 did slightly better against the other AMD chips, but it landed four seconds behind the Core i5…

Image: AMD FX-9590 (WME 9).jpg

Our recently adopted Handbrake 4K video-conversion test is another real-world test that does a good job of taxing all available CPU cores. In this test, the CPU is tasked with converting a 12-minute 4K video file (the short film Tears of Steel) to 1080p…

Image: AMD FX-9590 (Handbrake).jpg

In this scenario, the FX-9590 significantly bested the Intel Core i5-4570, while nearly halving the time of the lesser Core i3. But the highest-end FX chip didn't shave a huge amount of time off of the showing of the FX-8370, and the older FX-8350 actually finished ahead of the more recent AMD offerings.

Next up, in our Photoshop CS6 benchmark test, the AMD FX-9590 managed to lose out to the Core i3 chip. In this test, we apply a series of filters to a stock JPG image…

Image: AMD FX-9590 (Adobe Photoshop PS6).jpg

This is a test that combines a number of short filter applications, and it's multicore aware, but the tasks are not executed continuously. So it's likely that the powerful AMD FX-9590 just didn't get a chance to flex its multi-core muscle in the same sustained way that it did on the long Handbrake conversion, and in the POV Ray benchmark coming up.

Also, single-threaded or single-core performance is still a weak point for AMD chips, as evidenced by our iTunes encoding test, in which we convert 11 test tracks from MP3 to AAC format…

Image: AMD FX-9590 (iTunes).jpg

Here, all the Intel chips raced to the front of the pack, with even the Core i3-4130, which costs about half what the FX-9590 does, doing much better. The FX-9590's higher clock speed helped it do better here against other AMD chips. But Intel still has a strong lead on single-threaded tasks, and that's not going to change at least until AMD moves to a different chip architecture.

Last, using the test's "All CPUs" setting, we ran the POV Ray 3.7 benchmark, which challenges all available cores to render a complex photo-realistic image using ray tracing…

Image: AMD FX-9590 (POV Ray 37).jpg

The FX-9590 finished strong. Not only did it it easily outpace the Intel Core i3 and Core i5 competitors, it edged out even the pricier Core i7 chip. This kind of sustained, core-aware media-processing task seems to be the FX-9590's forte, but again, remember that you'll need much better cooling with the FX-9590, while Intel's chip can do nearly as well with decent air cooling, thanks to its much better efficiency.


Image: AMD FX-9590 (Box) (1).jpg

The FX-9590 is undoubtedly the highest-performing AMD consumer CPU yet, and its price is a lot more reasonable than it was at its debut in 2013. But by the time you factor in the cost of the extra cooling you'll need to keep it running at peak speed, not to mention the power requirements, which will tax both your power supply and your wallet, this is still a niche part.

If you're looking to upgrade to or build a budget-priced media-creation machine, it's not a bad choice, provided you opt for a roomy case with very good cooling, and you can find a decent deal on a robust liquid cooler. But most users considering the FX platform would be better off stepping down to an FX-8370 ($199.99 MSRP, and selling for around $180), or even the older FX-8350, arguably the best value ($179.99 MSRP, and selling for about $150).

On the other hand, if you're building a new system and craving high performance, even if it may cost a bit more, we'd recommend stepping up to an Intel Core i7 "Haswell" chip like the Core i7-4770K or the Core i7-4790K we mentioned earlier. An Intel chip may cost a bit more, but you can make up for at least some of that by opting for a lower-wattage power supply and less robust cooling, thanks to Intel's much better efficiency.

If you're intrepid, though, the FX-9590 is a very capable part that will give you bragging rights—not just to its clock speed, but to the powerful assortment of cooling gear you'll need to outfit your PC with to keep it tamed.

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