Scholzpdx, I'm glad you've brought up some other use-cases for FX chips. I've always considered an 8 core CPU to be rather excessive for Google Chrome, but I tend to have less than 6 tabs open at any given point, because I'm an organization freak. Someone like my brother, who regularly leaves 40+ tabs open, might benefit. Do background tabs use as much CPU as foreground ones though?
I think you'll have a hard time selling 40fps as being "plenty" to some gamers on here, but for you, the FX chips are a good match and as you've pointed out, compared with an i5, they can free up money for other parts on a fixed budget when compared with an i5 in some cases.
redzo also points out that FX chips are also good for VM boxes.
Intel has a nasty habit of disabling useful features on their lower-end chips. AFAIK, all of AMD's CPUs have a full feature set (including virtualization) and, with a proper motherboard, ECC too.
As for the power consumption argument, I feel in many cases it works out to near-negligible over the useful life of a CPU. Most of us here haven't (in the past) used a chip for more than 3-4 years. Things are starting to change with the slowed pace of advancement, but even so, I'm likely to sell my Ivy Bridge chip in a year or two, recoup most of the costs, and purchase a more modern platform to play with.
That said, I do look at the long-term cost of ownership, and it does factor into my decisions, among other things, and I put an i3 in my wife's computer after looking long and hard at AMD's APUs. Part of my decision was based on how quickly AMD chips depreciate vs Intel ones, and it's nice to know I can sell an i3 for nearly what I paid, several years later. Since we're in Florida right now, we pay for electricity twice when it comes to electronics due to the almost year-round need for air conditioning, which isn't true for those up north, whose CPUs double as heaters.
Beyond that, the games we regularly play are very CPU bottlenecked, and run badly on FX chips. She's not a power user with a bunch of tabs open, so a Pentium might have been perfectly fine too, while still providing the single-threaded performance that is necessary for our use-case. I appreciate that the Intel stock cooler is near-silent because we tend to choose studio apartments for the sake of keeping lifestyle inflation down, which means our PCs are near where we sleep, and noise is a concern. Size is also a concern, and our PCs are both in ITX cases and, despite both having HD7850's, can easily fit together in an average backpack and free up desk and floor space. We were also able to use $25 Antec power supplies in our builds, because even 380w is overkill. Our PCs together idle at less power than a single incandescent lightbulb, and both have integrated Wi-Fi and tons of USB3 ports, despite paying less than $60 for our motherboards.
With regards to hybrids:
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