The FX-9000 series of central processing units are now up for order

Jul 15, 2013 07:23 GMT  ·  By

Advanced Micro Devices may have said it won't bother competing with Intel anymore, but that doesn't mean it stopped making strong CPUs. It only means it will follow its own roadmap instead of trying to one-up its rival all the time.

The best proof that its desktop central processing unit lineup has been seeing as much attention as ever is the FX-9000 line of CPUs.

Currently made of the FX-9370 and FX-9590 CPUs, it is the fastest line of chips from Advanced Micro Devices.

Until recently, they were just a promise though. Only now have they begun selling, through online stores like TigerDirect.

Only the 4.7 GHz FX-9370 is available in stock for now though, as a standalone processor anyway, at a price of $353.34 / €270.53 – 353.34.

There are some offers for fully configured PCs too, like the iBUYPOWER gaming PC, which has the 5 GHz AMD FX-9590.

In fact, that particular system is quite well rounded, with 16GB DDR3 RAM, a hard disk drive (HDD) of 1TB capacity, an SSD (solid-state drive) of 120GB, and the 3GB AMD Radeon HD 7970 graphics card. It should have an easy time running even the latest and greatest games.

We initially detailed the AMD FX-9000 central processors back in June, and we outlined all the essential details as well.

For those who don't feel like looking around too much, though, here are the specs: clock speeds of 4.4/4.7 GHz for FX-9370, and 4.7/5 GHz for FX-9590, on-chip cache memory of 16 MB, unlocked clock multipliers (overclocking-ready as it were), and a TDP (thermal design power) of 220W.

The TDP is really the only downside, since it implies some restrictions, minimum requirements actually, for everything else a PC may have: 990FX/SB950 chipset motherboards, 1,200W power supplies, and DDR3-1600 or DDR3-1866 (9-10-9) memory. It's also a good idea to have very strong coolers, especially liquid cooling modules.