AMD being good was really jarring when I got back into building PCs a few years ago. I was so used to the Phenom and Bulldozer era, when the consensus was AMD was pretty much a joke. How times have changed..
For non gaming builds, the Phenom processors were a great value. I had a Phenom 2 X6 for running virtualization labs, no issues whatsoever. Bulldozer was a flop, no real performance gains over the Phenom 2's.