A Look at AMD’s 5 Ghz Chip the FX 9590

A TDP of Madness!

FX 5 GHz (1 of 3)

Last year AMD launched the FX 9590 an eight core chip clocked at 4.7 Ghz that turbos to 5 Ghz. That magic number that makes enthusiasts swoon, croon, and soon consume. If all you’ve ever wanted in your life is to finally win the Mhz wars once and for all then AMD’s got the chip for you. The reason that we’re looking at this chip today is that AMD has finally made it available to mere mortals thanks to a price cut and a couple of boxed retail versions rather than the OEM only version we’ve seen up until now.

FX 5 GHz (3 of 3)

For $290 not only to you get a 5 Ghz eight core chip but also a beefy closed loop water cooler and some sweet stickers. That’s right, to cool all 220 Watts of the rated TDP AMD’s seen fit to include a closed loop water cooler. And good on them for now I can hook up my water-cooled FX chip to my AMD 990FX motherboard with my AMD Gamer series memory and my Radeon R7 SSD coupled with my water-cooled Radeon R9 295X2 graphics card for my own personal AMD Radeon branded singularity.

FX 5 GHz (2 of 3)

If AMD’s marketing is anything its boisterous. For $290 you get a ridiculous chip, water cooling, and the ability to trade blows with similarly priced chips from Intel. Oh and a TDP more reminiscent of a subwoofer amplifier than a CPU. But here’s the kicker right; CPU performance for gaming applications hasn’t been relevant since Phenom II launched. Thus the question boils down to this: do you want to tell you friends you have an eight core, unlocked, water cooled, 5 Ghz monster or a Core i5-Somethingmeaningless? because for gaming at 1080P with a decent graphics card there’s no perceptible difference.S|A

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Thomas Ryan is a freelance technology writer and photographer from Seattle, living in Austin. You can also find his work on SemiAccurate and PCWorld. He has a BA in Geography from the University of Washington with a minor in Urban Design and Planning and specializes in geospatial data science. If you have a hardware performance question or an interesting data set Thomas has you covered.