While it’s been obvious AMDs big focus has been on their APUs for the last few years. Even so in the background they have still been making a few waves with the FX line of CPUs, the main one being the launch of the 5GHz CPU a little over a year ago. Just when we thought they may have forgotten about the enthusiasts they are actually introducing a few new CPUs to the FX lineup and making changes to the overall pricing structure to better place their CPUs to compete with Intel’s introductions over the summer. Today I’m going to mainly be focusing on the newly introduced FX-8370 and the lower wattage FX-9370E, but AMD did send along the FX-9370 and the FX-9590 so we can see how the new CPUs perform in relation to their bigger brothers.

Product Name: AMD FX-8370 FX-8370e FX-9370 and FX-9590

Review Sample Provided by: AMD

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

As I mentioned in the opening, the new CPUs are basically just a refresh, that means they are still running on the Piledriver architecture that was introduced a few years ago now. While that news might not be the most encouraging, its isn’t all bad. With a little time they have been able to get better yields and start dropping pricing across their entire lineup. Considering the fact that from a gamers perspective there are very few games that really take advantage of the highest end CPUs this means CPUs that are more than capable of handling all of your games are easier to get. On top of that with Intel only last week introducing their first 8 core CPUs that range from a costly $583 to a wallet melting $99, AMD is still the cheapest option in the 8 core market. All of the FX CPUs have 8 cores and they range from an MSRP of $147 to $290, the $290 being the FX-9590 with water cooling bundled in with it.

As you can see above, the high power FX-9590 pulls an impressive 220 watts. The new 8370 is a little better with it only requiring the same 125 watts that the 8350 also pulled. The new 8370e is more impressive with its 95 watt TDP though. Before you couldn’t find a CPU higher than the FX-8100 with that low of a power requirement and that was with its 2.8GHz  clock speed. The new FX-8370e bumps things up to 3.3 with an impressive 4.3 turbo clock speed. The base clock of the FX-8370e is actually higher than the FX-8100’s 3.1 turbo clock speed. AMD also introduced the FX-8320e that also pulls a lower wattage and has a better price point, hopefully we will be able to check it out in the future as well. 

They all still run on the 990FX chipset and as usual there aren’t any changes in the socket that will require you to pick up a new motherboard should you decide to upgrade to one of the new CPUs,  they run on AM3+ so if you have that you are good to go. The chipset has all of the necessities with things like the capability to have 14 USB ports but USB 3.0 will require another controller.