I take from this paragraph that you haven't used a FX yet. I had the same mindset of not touching the FXs because of the reviews. I eventually gave up to the temptation as those microcenter combos were screaming "buy me".
What did I notice going from unlocked 960T Zosma stock to a FX4100 in one machine? Performance wise, practically nothing. System has a Sandisk extreme 120GB SSD (toggle nand) as boot drive so it was already very responsive. The system didn't lose or gain any perceivable speed in any application. What I DID notice is that the system was quieter. The system fan was running slower pretty much all the time. After further reading I found that the FX has much lower power usage at idle or low utilization, and the motherboard was doing a good job with the PWM fan.
Piledriver improves on bulldozer in every way, so for low power usage (web browsing, office work, etc) it will be even quieter. I have some machines with relatives to update, and I know that trinity with SSD will be a BIG improvement in them, and it will handle the occasional game.