AMD FX 9590 and 9370

AMD FX 9590 and 9370 Review – In the good old days, the frequency of a CPU was a great way to measure how fast it was, but those days are long gone. In case you needed any proof, the AMD FX 9590 is it. With a top speed of 5GHz and quad-cores, we wouldn’t blame you for thinking it’s going to be a killer CPU, but the benchmarks show otherwise. The 9370 is simply a slower clocked variant of the 9590, with a top speed of 4.7GHz.

Both CPUs are based on AMD’s AMD3+ socket, and use the Vishera core. This is built on a rather archaic 32nm process, which could explain why both CPUs are extremely hot. With a TDP of 220W, they’re almost twice as hot as Intel’s cooler chips, and will require serious cooling to operate. AMD offers the 9590 with a water cooling kit as a bundle, but our pricing reflects the standalone price without cooler.

Our benchmarks show that both of these chips can be capable performers in heavily threaded applications such as GTA5, but the weak cores really let it down in the 3DMark Physics test, where both chips lag behind Intel’s chips by a considerable margin. The Cinebench test highlights why, showing just how slow each core is when compared to Intel’s core design.

As a result we’re hesitant to recommend these chips. While they’re probably fine in GPU limited games, if the CPU is ever leaned on heavily we’re not confident that these AMD chips will be able to handle the load. And it’s better to be safe than sorry, even if you could save $100 in the process.

Pros

• 5 GHz is impressive
• Decent price point ($315 and $285)

Cons

• Extremely Hot
• Weak single-core performance