AMD FX-9590 Eight-Core Processor
AMD's flagship FX Series processor is the FX-9590 Eight-Core CPU that came out during the summer of 2013. This processor was a beast when it came out as it had 8-cores along with a 220W TDP rating, a 4.7 GHz base clock and a turbo clock of 5.0 GHz. The bad news is that they were extremely hard to get at the time due to only a handful of processors being able successfully hit those speeds not to mention only a handful of AMD 990FX boards supported a 220W TDP processor and you needed water cooling.
AMD FX Processors For AM3+ | |||||||
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Model Number | Frequency | Total L2 Cache | L3 Cache | Cores | Thermal Design Power | Mfg Process | Price |
FX 9590 | 4.7/5.0 GHz | 8MB | 8MB | 8C/8T | 220W | 32nm SOI | $199.99 |
FX 9370 | 4.4/4.7 GHz | 8MB | 8MB | 8C/8T | 220W | 32nm SOI | $179.99 |
FX 8370 | 4.0/4.3 GHz | 8MB | 8MB | 8C/8T | 125W | 32nm SOI | $184.99 |
FX 8370E | 3.3/4.3 GHz | 8MB | 8MB | 8C/8T | 95W | 32nm SOI | $196.67 |
FX 8350 | 4.0/4.2 GHz | 8MB | 8MB | 8C/8T | 125W | 32nm SOI | $149.99 |
FX 8320 | 3.5/4.0 GHz | 8MB | 8MB | 8C/8T | 125W | 32nm SOI | $134.99 |
FX 8320E | 3.2/4.0 GHz | 8MB | 8MB | 8C/8T | 95W | 32nm SOI | $129.99 |
FX 8300 | 3.3/4.2GHz | 8MB | 8MB | 8C/8T | 95W | 32nm SOI | $104.95 |
FX 6300 | 3.9/4.2GHz | 6MB | 8MB | 6C/6T | 125W | 32nm SOI | $80.99 |


Our CPU Test Systems
Before we look at the numbers, let’s take a brief look at the test system that was used. All testing was done on a fresh install of Windows 10 Pro Anniversary Update 1607 build 14393.10 64-bit and benchmarks were completed on the desktop with no other software programs running. We tested on five different desktop platforms (Intel Z77, Intel Z97, Intel Z270, Intel X99 and AMD AM3+) in this article, so we'll just quickly touch on each as all shared common parts (CPU Cooler, Video Card, SSD, Power Supply) and only differed in the board, processor, memory kit and memory timings.
Intel LGA1151 Test Platform | |||||
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Component |
Brand/Model |
Live Pricing |
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Processor |
Intel Core i7-7700K |
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Motherboard |
Gigabyte Z270X-Gaming 5 | Click Here | |||
Memory |
16GB Vengeance 3000MHz DDR4 | Click Here | |||
Video Card |
GeForce GTX 1080 FE | Click Here | |||
Hard Drive |
Crucial MX300 1050GB | Click Here | |||
Cooling |
Corsair H105 | Click Here | |||
Keyboard |
Corsair K70 RGB | Click Here | |||
Mouse |
Corsair M65 Pro | Click Here | |||
Power Supply |
Corsair AX860i | Click Here | |||
Monitor |
ASUS VE278Q 27" | Click Here | |||
Operating System |
Windows 10 64-Bit | Click Here |

Memory Bandwidth Benchmarks
SiSoftware Sandra 2016 SP3 Memory Bandwidth: link
SiSoftware Sandra 2016 is a utility, which includes remote analysis, benchmarking and diagnostic features for PCs, servers, mobile devices and networks. This test has been popular for CPU and memory benchmarks for well over a decade and it is one of the easiest benchmarks out there to run.
AIDA64 5.80 Memory & Cache Benchmark: link
AIDA64 is an industry-leading system information tool, loved by PC enthusiasts around the world, which not only provides extremely detailed information about both hardware and installed software, but also helps users diagnose issues and offers benchmarks to measure the performance of the computer.

Real World Benchmarks
Dolphin 5.0 x64 Emulator Benchmark: link
The long awaited Dolphin 5.0 release happened in 2016 and thanks to a major cleaning up of the codebase Dolphin has reached a new level of efficiency, powered by a revitalized dynamic recompiler. Dolphin is considered by many to be the best Nintendo Wii emulator for PC you can find. It also works for Gamecube. We are running the official Dolphin 5.0 benchmark as it offers closer mapping to real world Dolphin performance as the previous version was extremely floating point heavy. We feel this is a pretty good general CPU benchmark for real world performance as emulation workloads are something that most gamers will run at one point or another. We benchmark the standard Wii homebrew application and run it with the speed limit set to 'unlimited' and the External Frame Buffer set to 'real' in case you wanted to run this on your personal system.
Agisoft Photoscan 1.2.6 x64 - 2D to 3D Image Manipulation Benchmark: link
Agisoft PhotoScan is a stand-alone software product that performs photogrammetric processing of 2D digital images and generates 3D spatial data to be used in GIS applications, cultural heritage documentation, and visual effects production as well as for indirect measurements of objects of various scales. We us the 50 images from the 'Building' sample data download page for our benchmark. We take the total time it takes to complete four steps: Align Photos, Build Dense Cloud, Build Model, Build Texture with all the default settings for each.
KeyShot 6.3 - 3D Rendering and Animation: link
KeyShot 3D rendering and animation software is one of the fastest, easiest way to create amazing, photographic visuals of your 3D data. We installed KeyShot 6.3 to do some benchmarking and real-world stress testing using the camera_benchmark.bip scene that is included with the application. This benchmark tests a 800x554 pixel image with a continuous sample rate and shows the Frames Per Second (FPS) that the scene is being rendered from. This scene has nearly 42,000 triangles and does a good job at using all available cores to render the scene.
Blender 2.78a Open Source 3D Creation Benchmark: link
Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite.
Media Encoding & Encryption Benchmarks
HandBrake v1.0.1 - link
HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. It is popular today as it allows you to transcode multiple input video formats to h.264 output format and is highly multithreaded. We used Big Buck Bunny as our input file, which has become one of the world standards for video benchmarks. For our benchmark scenario we used a standard 2D 4K (3840x2160) 60 FPS clip in the MP4 format and used Handbrake version 1.0.1 to do two things. We used the new Fast 1080p30 preset to shrink that down to a 1920 x 1080 video clip to reduce the file size. This is something people often do to save space to put movies onto mobile devices. We also ran the workload using the normal preset as it puts the CPU at a higher load than the Fast 1080p30 preset.

X264 HD Encoding - link
the x264 HD Benchmark is a reproducible measure of how fast your machine can encode a short HD-quality video clip into a high quality x264 video file. It’s nice because everyone running it will use the same video clip and software. The video encoder (x264.exe) reports a fairly accurate internal benchmark (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encode and it also uses multi-core processors very efficiently. All these factors make this an ideal benchmark to compare different processors and systems to each other. We are using x264 HD v5.0.1 for this test.
VeraCrypt 1.19 - link
VeraCrypt is an open-source disk encryption software brought to you by IDRIX and is a fork based on the discontinued TrueCrypt 7.1a utility. The developers claim that weaknesses found in TrueCrypt have been resolved with the VeraCrypt project. This is a popular utility used by people that don't want to use Microsoft's built-in encyption tool for Windows 10 called Bitlocker.
Web JavaScript & HTML5 Benchmarks
Mozilla Kraken 1.1: link
Kraken is a JavaScript performance benchmark created by Mozilla that measures the speed of several different test cases extracted from real-world applications and libraries. Kraken uses a test harness based on the SunSpider benchmark. Results are reported in milliseconds (lower is better).
Google Octane 2.0: link
Octane 2.0 is a benchmark created by Google that measures a JavaScript engine’s performance by running a suite of tests that is supposed to be representative of today’s complex and demanding web applications. Octane‘s goal is to measure the performance of JavaScript code found in large, real-world web applications, running on modern mobile and desktop browsers. The latest Octane 2.0 benchmark includes four new tests to measure new aspects of JavaScript performance, including garbage collection / compiler latency and asm.js-style JavaScript performance.
JetStream 1.1: link
JetStream combines a variety of JavaScript benchmarks, covering a variety of advanced workloads and programming techniques, and reports a single score that balances them using geometric mean. JetStream includes benchmarks from the SunSpider 1.0.2 and Octane 2 JavaScript benchmark suites. It also includes benchmarks from the LLVM compiler open source project, compiled to JavaScript using Emscripten 1.13. It also includes a benchmark based on the Apache Harmony open source project's HashMap and a port of the CDx benchmark, hand-translated to JavaScript.
WebXPRT 2015: link
WebXPRT 2015 uses scenarios created to mirror the tasks you do every day to compare the performance of almost any Web-enabled device. It contains six HTML5- and JavaScript-based workloads: Photo Enhancement, Organize Album, Stock Option Pricing, Local Notes, Sales Graphs, and Explore DNA Sequencing.
3DMark & Cinebench
Futuremark 3DMark 2.2.3509 - link
3DMark is a popular gaming performance benchmark that includes everything you need to benchmark your PC whether you're gaming on a desktop PC, laptop, notebook, or a tablet. 3DMark includes seven benchmark tests and we'll be running 'Sky Diver' that is aimed at gaming laptops and mid-range PCs.
Maxon Cinebench R15.038 - link
CINEBENCH is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON's award-winning animation software Cinema 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Iron Man 3, Oblivion, Life of Pi or Prometheus and many more.

Discrete GPU Gaming Performance
Thief
Thief is a series of stealth video games in which the player takes the role of Garrett, a master thief in a fantasy/steampunk world resembling a cross between the Late Middle Ages and the Victorian era, with more advanced technologies interspersed. Thief is the fourth title in the Thief series, developed by Eidos Montreal and published by Square Enix on February 25, 2014. We picked this game title for CPU testing as it is known to scale well with CPUs. We use the games built-in benchmark and test with the default settings with these changes; exclusive fullscreen, vSync off, 1920 x 1080, 60Hz.
Grand Theft Auto V
Grand Theft Auto V, currently one of the hottest PC games, was finally released for the PC on April 14, 2015. Developed by Rockstar, it is set in 2013 and the city of Los Santos. It utilizes the Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) which Rockstar has been using since 2006, with multiple updates for technology improvements. We picked this game title for CPU testing as it is known to scale well with CPUs. We use the games built-in benchmark and test with the default settings with these changes; vSync off, 1920 x 1080, 60Hz.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is an action role-playing stealth video game developed by Eidos Montreal and published by Square Enix. Set in a cyberpunk-themed dystopian world in 2029, two years after the events of Human Revolution, Mankind Divided features the return of Adam Jensen from the previous game, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, with new technology and body augmentations. The game was released on August 23rd, 2016 for PC users and we are using it to show DX12 performance on the CPUs that we tested. DX12 removed most all of the CPU overhead, so we wanted to see what happens to performance on DX12 game titles as well. We use the games built-in benchmark and test with the default settings with these changes; DX12 enabled, exclusive fullscreen, vSync off, 1920 x 1080, 60Hz, medium graphics.
Power Consumption and Temperatures
No review is complete without taking a look at power and the Intel Core i3-7350K doesn't disappoint when we looked closer at the power numbers.

Final Thoughts and Conclusions
After taking a fresh look at the AMD FX-9590 processor it is clear that AMD needs Ryzen to be successful. The AMD FX-9590 8-core processor was somewhat competitive with the Intel Core i7-2700K processor, but keep in mind that is an older processor from the Sandy Bridge-era way back in 2011. The AMD FX-9590 processor is priced at $199.99 with free shipping today a fair price for an 8-core processor, but the AMD PileDriver architecture used on these FX series processors just can't compete with what Intel has been releasing for more than half a decade now.

