Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsHas its flaws.
Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2018
The FX 9590 is simply an overclocked FX 8350 (in comparison, not literally.) This means it's a terrible overclocking CPU as it's already overclocked. This series of CPUs were also known to be considered "ovens" by the general public & overclocking community. With diamond thermal paste, an open case, a closed water system, & extremely powerful corsair fans it still hovers around 46-50 degress during normal use (like watching youtube videos.) During gaming sessions, it jumps up to 61 degrees. If you're doing CPU intensive processing it'll immediately hit 70 degrees even with a very good closed water-cooling system like a Corsair h115i. This is most likely why overclocks fail & the PC freezes as well since it is hitting the thermal wall right as it starts to "stretch its legs" which is a similar issue to Intel's i9 9980XE...another oven. The difference between the 9980XE & this though is that the 9980XE has 18 cores & the FX-9590 has only 8...
To test the processing power of this CPU I decided to stream with software encoding turned on to bypass my GPU. Immediately this CPU went into bottlenecking when doing 1080p, 60 fps. Everything stopped & stuttered on the PC & the stream was unwatchable. It was like I was using a PC back in the 90s again.
I also tried video editing & the results weren't great as well. I have it overclocked to 4.82 GHz as it could handle 5GHz at first then just "couldn't" one day & I had to lower it to 4.92 then 4.82. Trying to render video is a nightmare as if you're doing anything else while the video is rendering the PC freezes, forcing you to start the entire process over again. It also takes at least double the time of the video length to render the video. A 9-hour video of a stream took about 20 hours to render, meaning I couldn't use this PC for 20 hours for fear of it freezing. I turned off the overclock & things seemed to work fine, I haven't experienced any freezing while rendering.
Gaming wise when paired with a good GPU it works extremely well, able to handle all games on 1080p ultra at about 55-60+ fps depending on the game. If it's not graphics intensive, you're pretty much guaranteed 100+ fps. It can even handle 4k optimized extremely well.
Liquid metal application is a breeze & makes this processor much more efficient. Using Conductonaut I dropped from 46-50 celcius average average temps to 29-30 celsius! Everything runs much smoother & I am going to retest streaming, rendering videos, etc. now that the thermal wall seems to have been conquered! So far with liquid metal I was able to bump it back up to a comfortable 4.92GHz with only a 6 celsius rise in temps with the voltage change from 1.47 to 1.49 volts on the cpu vcore. I've tried bumping the OC to 5.0, but it fails Prime95 even though it doesnt come close to 70 celsius even with 1.53 volts on the cpu. It seems I might just have been unlucky in the silicon lottery as cores 1&3 fail first always meaning they are weak cores. As long as I didn’t do anything processor intensive, I could run 5.0GHz fine though since it's not engaging cores 1&3 as much.
There have been a few people able to overclock this thing to 5+ GHz & at one point I was running 5 GHz for a few weeks before it just "couldn't." Those people must've won the silicon lottery as there are a of ton of people in the same boat as me.
Overall, it's a powerful chip that is inefficient & terrible with heat dissipation. I suspect if you're running some crazy liquid nitrogen setup you can tame the heat & have this chip realize its full potential, but for everyone else just stick with the 8350 or move on to a Ryzen as in 2018 this chip shows it's age & will bottleneck modern GPUs as the hardware it's paired is so far behind now. This processor can run VR when paired with a good GPU like a 980 Ti. If you need to rely heavily on just the CPU though look elsewhere. There's a reason this CPU is nicknamed "Faildozer."
