Split Decision - AMD FX-9590 vs. Intel Core i7-4790K

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Karbanthus

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Sep 26, 2014
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I am doing a fairly substantial upgrade to my out of date gaming rig i.e. replacing everything but the case and HDDs. I am have a very tough decision which processor I want to run.

Here they are:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113347
On this MB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130649

OR

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117369
On this MB
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132125


I looked that the specs of each CPU and they seem pretty similar. I just want a (probably more trained) look at things.
 
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So what kind of cooler would I need for that? I was planning on closed loop liquid for the AMD build but don't know if that is neccessary.
 
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But the price is a hundred dollars or more difference when you buy it.
The key thing is OP's budget.

You can argue that in order to cool the fX 9590 you need water cooling which will drive up the price.
But then if you are going to buy i7 4790K, as if you are not going to invest in a expensive cooler in order to overclock.
Tell me you are going to run i7 4790K on intel stock cooler and give me the opportunity to laugh in your face.
 
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theres no problem running an i7 on stock just don't overclock until you get a better cooler. the 9XXX FX ships with water coolers (now) I thought. maybe older produced ones don't.
 
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Yes of course there is no problem running an i7 on stock.
My point was that why buy the i7 k version if you are not going to overclock? If you are going oc, then the price is still going to be up 100 dollars or more.

You are just going to spend more money for equal performance.
Math:
FX 9590 + High end cooler = 350
i7 4790K stock = 350
i7 4790K + high end cooler = 450


What is OP's budget?

Now if the question were 4790 non K, then it's another ballgame.
'
 
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well he may want to OC one day, and if that day comes its just a cooler away.
 
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Yeah 100$ bucks for a cooler? you can get a Hyper 212 EVO for 25-30 bucks, so I don't know what youre talking about. No one 'needs' a high end cooler, 30$ will get you a modest overclock and still a better value than the FX 9XXX series, not to mention the power draw difference.
 
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exactly, but its a GREAT idea to leave that option open, can yield huge gains and save you from future (major) upgrades.

The 9XXX series is already like an 8XXX series FX OC'd, so the headroom is diminished trying to OC that or not.
With the k version i7 you get amazing performance at stock, and the ability to overclock well beyond what an FX chip is capable of.

if it was between an i5 and FX 8 core then we could argue, but the i7 is just the better chip, and it sits in a different price class for a reason. The FX 9XXX series is a (well known) joke.
 
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The AMD is 220 Watt and the Intel is 88 Watt TDP.
Now 220 - 88 = 132 Watt
132 (W) /1000 = 0.132 kW X 24(hours) = 3.168 (kWh)X 365 (days)= 1156.32
You are using 1156.32 More kWh if you use AMD.
Now you got to figure out how much you will pay more if you use AMD instead of Intel after one year.
So use 1156.32 kWh and time however much your power company charges every kWh.
For example, if we use 17.67 cents per kWh (2014 California US rate), you are using 204.32 dollars more.

Now before you all freak out, keep in mind that figure is if you run your computer 24 hours a day for a whole year using 100 percent of your CPU. Who does that? Is the Bitcoin craze still going on? Is the OP a bitcoin miner?

More likely you will only use your PC for less than that. If we use our PC 10 hours, we take the 204.32 and it becomes 85.14 dollars. (204.32/10/24) With most of us using our CPU only 80 percent load most of the time, it's going to be (85.14/.80) = 68.11. That's per year. Beside, these figures are generous.

That's if you are living in California with insane power rates. Most of the US are averaging around 12.5cents / kWh.

With the money saved by buying a cheaper AMD chip, the power bill is most likely going to catch up with your saving after 3 years or even more most likely. By which time OP and others will probably upgrade their computer anyway.

Power figures provided by http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_5_6_a

Edit:
Can some people provide us with the TDP of i7 4790K after overclock please?
How much less of TDP are there really after i7 overclock?

Furthermore, if you are using only a 30 dollar cooler, how much of an overclock is there?
 
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I just got an FX-9590 and an ASUS M5A99FX PRO R2.0 motherboard to go with it, cooled with an Silverstone Argon AR03 air cooler. I closely examined available Intel options and chose the FX-9590 over Intel's i7 offerings.

Many comments online put down this chip and AMD in general because Intel has higher-performing options available, and most of those comments are completely missing one vital factor: PRICE. I got the CPU and motherboard together for $355 tax + shipping. The i7-4790K is $340 for just a CPU and no motherboard at all.

I walked away during a CPU sale special paying $220 total for the FX-9590 chip. It's faster in video compression benchmarks than EVERY desktop Intel chip EXCEPT the X-series i7 chips. It runs with or near the 4770K in almost every other benchmark, excluding some games. I haven't found benchmarks with the FX-9590 and i7-4790K against one another so I can only compare to the 4770K.

For those of you jeering at "efficiency" and praising how much faster Intel's Haswell chips can be, I wish you the best...but I'll be able to get an SSD, better RAM, or a nicer graphics card because I have $100 extra in my pocket, all while enjoying roughly the same performance. Best of all, there's no LGA socket with extremely fragile pins to void my warranty; you know, when you return a mobo and they refuse to honor your return because "user-caused CPU socket pin damage" even though it was sent back because a nearby defective power component visibly burned up.

You can have your lower performance-per-currency-unit chips and thermal efficiency; I'll take the best overall deal, thanks!

EDIT: The answer selected for this question has no substance and does nothing but point at a CPUBoss comparison. CPUBoss has no real-world workload benchmarks and raw numbers and feature comparisons don't reflect a processor's actual performance. There is also no price-to-performance comparison, meaning that the "answer" doesn't tell you how much workload processing you get for the money you spend.

Here is a real "FX-9590 vs. Intel" comparison: http://nctritech.wordpress.com/2014/10/23/amd-fx-9590-beats-intel-core-i7-4770k-4790k-5960x-etc-in-price-vs-performance-comparisons/

How do various Intel CPUs compare with the AMD FX-9590 in real-world benchmarks once price is included as a factor?
amd_fx-9590_vs_intel_core_i7.png
 
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I've actually been struggling with this one a lot lately. Have been using a 9590 for the last 6 months but recently grabbed a 4790k through the retail edge summer deal, just waiting on delivery. Have been weighing the pros and cons for a few weeks. Will try and break it down ignoring stuff that doesn't matter for the layman.

FX-9590 Pro's:
-Drastically larger L2 Cache (slightly slower, better multitask?)
-Slightly higher maximum bandwidth

i7-4790k Pro's:
-Much better single core performance (big one, probably due to smaller L2 and larger L3)
-Drastically lower power draw (see other posts in this thread, tl;dr = 88W vs 220W)

The cons are a little more complicated. In actuality I haven't been able to push my 9590 past its "base" frequencies, and I'm not inexperienced at OC'ing. The 9590 is basically an 8350 that is capable of pushing 5 GHz on its own, explaining the power draw, etc etc. More worrying is the fact that after only 6 months of use the proc seems to be benchmarking around what an i3 is capable of on single core performance, I really doubt even a hyper 212 can cool it down with turbo on, and only the Crosshair or sabertooth boards VRMs can handle the 9590. :pfff:.

The 4790k is more expensive but does everything the 9590 does better without any of the drawbacks for most users.

If you're hemming and hawing price wise don't get either. Shoot for an i5. If you're feeling enthusiastic, get the 4790k, HERO VII, 1600 MHz Vengeance Pro's and you're set. Vs. the 9590, Crosshair V, 1866 DIMMs, bigger PSU, and liquid cooler. It's $800 either way and your running costs in the first 6 months will balance out any difference.


 
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This is a very important thing to point out: most people do not honestly require the power of a high-end consumer market CPU. Most video games don't benefit enough from getting an i7 instead of an i5 to justify the cost and I seriously doubt that most people visiting this site are using their computers for 24/7 media transcoding, 4K video editing, or CAD.

If the CPU is going to sit idle 95% of the time and you can deal with an extra two minutes in Handbrake or getting 115 fps instead of 120 fps (you are biologically unable to see a difference past ~60 fps anyway) then why are you wasting money on a high-end CPU? Get what suits your needs and spend the rest of that money on something else you need in your life, or shove it in an investment account to make you money while you sleep. Having a desktop that you blew hundreds of dollars on that you will never need the full power of isn't really going to impress anyone and isn't doing yourself any favors.

This stuff gets overlooked in the "AMD vs. Intel" and "i5/i7 vs. i7" type threads a lot. It's important to buy a computer for what it'll be used for, not as some sort of status symbol. This is why I went with an AMD A8-7600 when I built a new server: it has instructions (AES-NI etc.) that accelerate encrypted external drives for off-site backups, hardware virtualization for any VMs I may want to put on the network, and plenty of processing power for a glorified network attached storage box without using too much electricity as it sits there doing almost nothing most of the time. Sure, I could have gone for an A10 or even another FX-9590 chip, but that would have been really stupid and a total waste of funds that could be spent on more internal hard drives or RAM.
 
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One thing all of you have overlooked, and even though I am posting this almost a year later than most of you i feel it is important as I myself got to this thread within the first couple of google hits.
The fx9590 is a power hungry beast. 220watts worth of power hungry. Not many motherboards actually support 220watt CPU's and the ones that do are around the 200 euro range so maybe a bit more in dollars. Most importantly almost none of the manufacturers state their values for maximum supported TPD and it is a hassle to even find those values anywhere. I as one of many have bought this CPU and have tried running it on a board that after research claims to support up to 140 watt CPU's, resulting in my case after updating my BIOS in a pc that won't start up as the manufacurer of my mobo had too many burnt down boards returned to them as a result of this combination. Even hardware stores that have built rigs for people made this mistake.

The budget powerhouse this is supposed to be is negated almost entirely by the fact it is so powerhungry as the price for the CPU and a motherboad that can support it will be around 450 euro's while spending 350 on an i7 4790k and 100-200 for a motherboard of choice will cost you the same or a tad more for alot more performance and reliability.

I am just in the process of returning my board and CPU in favor of spending about 100 bucks more to get the i7 and a motherboard that has some nice features and enough space to fit all my fans. Even an i5 would do better than this thing and will cost you less is the funny thing so please people if you read this: don't buy this POS or sell it if you still have the chance. Send it back and order another part if you have to and say it never worked or something to try and get your money back!
 
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