At its heart, the FX-9590 isn’t all that much different from previous FX-series CPUs. Like the FX-8350, it uses AMD’s 32nm Piledriver architecture, comes with 8MB of L2 cache and eight cores, supports DDR3 speeds of up to 1866MHz and can be used in conjunction with any supporting AM3+ motherboard. The 5GHz core frequency has been attained through the use of AMD’s Turbo Core 3.0 which allows a base clock of 4.7GHz to hit higher levels when the right conditions present themselves. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen very often as our processor remained at 4.7GHz in most workloads.
As one might expect, actually getting a lower clocked architecture to hit such high levels requires some heavy-duty muscle alongside stringent binning. In this case, a massive amount of voltage -1.5V- has been applied and this has a secondary, nasty side effect: a substantial increase in heat production and power requirements. While the FX-8350’s TDP of 125W was deemed inefficient, the FX-9590 brings things to a whole new level with an estimated thermal output of 200W-220W. That’s an important number to remember when choosing a cooler since only the very best air-based solutions will be able to keep temperatures under control.