AMD’s FX-9590 is still the top CPU value four years later

Back in 2014 when Jesus rode dinosaurs and Nazca aviators ruled the skies, I wrote an article about the AMD FX-9590 and how it beat all of the modern Intel chips of the day in a price-to-performance comparison I performed. It was a better value than every Intel Haswell and Broadwell chip available in 2014. Of course, benchmarks of newer systems against the aging FX-9590 show that gaming performance is clearly way better on newer platforms, largely due to PCI Express 3.0 support (FX-9590 boards max out at PCI Express 2.0 x16) and, more recently, the rise of consumer DDR4 memory and NVMe solid-state drives. As I was poking around various system benchmarks for newer platforms, I got curious about the FX-9590’s price-to-performance ratio today, four years and several processor generations later. You’d expect a chip that’s several generations long in the tooth to fall behind in value due to improvements in newer platforms, especially with AMD’s new Ryzen architecture fighting Intel’s 8th-generation i7 offerings.

Imagine my pleasant surprise when I saw this:

AMD FX-9590 best value on PassMark
AMD FX-9590 is still the best performance value on PassMark

Modern CPUs in the picture are boxed in orange. Notably, the price of an FX-9590 is way down from the $250-$300 range where it hovered for a long time. Amazon prices really are close to the stated $99.99 price tag. Four years after the power-sucking 220W 8-core beast was released, it continues to dominate in provided performance per dollar. I’m still using the FX-9590 system I built four years ago for heavy-duty computing work and video editing. I have other computers that are actually from the current year, but none of them is as fast as the FX-9590 box.

Long live the AMD FX-9590. You’re my favorite space heater and I hope you keep humming under my desk and making me uncomfortably hot for a long time to come.

Flamethrower FX-9590Affectionately known as “Flamethrower.”

5 thoughts on “AMD’s FX-9590 is still the top CPU value four years later

  1. I’m right there with ya. I play all the current games with respectable fps. Destiny 2 looks great so does farcry 5. Max settings. Paird with a rx-580 from best buy it does vr just fine on rift. I did custome closed loop for cooling adding another $350 to price for me but it’s cool and stable so it’s worth it for me. 9590 gets alot of hate tho. I wouldn’t recommend it for noobz.

  2. I have this! With 5.12ghz using only air cooling. I will upgrade to water cooling this month using a 480mm radiator hope to push stable to 5.5Ghz. I have CBCPU1=121.717433 on a single core test Cinebenchmark r15. 802cb on all cores and paling all day from 8:00am to 1.00am 48Fps to 58Fps on 4Kmonitor 55″ 3840×2160 settings. The problem with the 9590 is power, if you overclock and the voltage is to low the machine will freeze. If the overlock voltage is to high for example1.5v or higher the cpu will have power but then you need a very good cooling system to handle that power.
    Thanks so much for support this awesome cpu.

    1. I wonder how you were able to air cool it! I bought the biggest air cooling system I could find and it still couldn’t hold up under full load. Maybe your just happens to have binned better than mine; after all, the FX-9590 is nothing more than “lucky” FX-8350 chips that binned extremely well and so received factory overclocking.

      1. I run mine at 4.85 all cores, 1.475v on air all day long. Big GTS V8 cooler and temps around 52c full load.

        Vrms get hot tho 93c under ibt

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