Overall and Final Verdict
Let’s not beat around the bush, I think we would all like to see the FX CPUs perform a little faster overall. No one likes a bully or a monopoly and all of us want to see AMD step up and put up a heck of a fight with the boys in blue. If you came into this review expecting to see that, I’m sorry. All four CPUs performed better than I expected them too, they are running on a two year old architecture trying to compete with Intel’s latest.
While they might not be able to take out the $999 CPUs, what I am most interested in is how they compare to similarly priced CPUs from Intel. With an MSRP of $226 for the most expensive (FX-9590) and $199 for the lowest priced (FX-8370) they are priced near the I5-4670 and i5-4570. What is important to note that Intel doesn’t have a CPU anywhere near this for an eight or even six core CPU. This is where I see AMD really setting themselves apart. You might not get the raw horsepower on a per CPU level, but if you run VMs or do a lot of multi-threaded computing I think the FX CPUs are up your ally. Even when gaming they still have more than enough power to push anything out on the market today assuming you pair it with a high end GPU. So all of the AMD purists don’t have to jump ship just yet!
To me more than anything else this small refresh means that AMD hasn’t forgotten the enthusiasts and gamers. If anything, I feel like this might be a renewed interest in pushing that market forward. On our call with AMD they mentioned that the plan is for this refresh to help pay for tomorrows research. What they mean by that is designing CPUs to compete with Intel isn’t cheap, refreshing this lineup with pricing that fits the completion and the new CPUs should help them fund the research to put out the next big thing in the FX lineup. For that, I can’t wait!
