I have used an Athlon X2 370k every day for around a year now. I replaced an AM3 Regor cored Athlon II X2 270 3.4ghz setup with an FM2 370k setup, basically staying at the same price level but upgrading what amounts to 4 generations.
I set it with no turbo, and the clock permanently set to 4.3ghz.
In operation, it performs at roughly the same level as the older chip. In some things, including some games, it performs better than the older chip (which is clocked almost a full gigahertz lower than the newer chip), in other things it performed worse - planetside 2 being a good example. So all in all, it performs no better than a chip 4 years older than it and only clocked at 3.4ghz.
That said, it will run the majority of games at playable framerates at medium to high settings when coupled with a decent mid-range graphics card and 8gb 1866mhz ram or higher. But some it will most certainly struggle with.
One area where the chip is significantly worse is in music production, possibly because of the strong floating point performance needed when making music, with the X2 370k having only one fpu to share between 2 integer cores.
Having seen the performance of even Ivybridge Core i5 and overclocked performance of the intel chips, i can say that even a dual core pentium/celeron or better yet an i3 would give a noticeable improvement over the Athlon X2 370k.
If you want to go the cheap amd route, i would suggest the socket FM2 Athlon X4 860k, which is a newer architecture that addresses some of the deficits of the Richland chips, and is a quad core. This is actually the flagship quad core A10-7850k with the onboard graphics disabled and a price of around £56 or $79. Clock for clock this chip is around 20% faster than the X2 370k, has 2 more cores which helps with the more modern games, and overclocks well.
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