Going to be buying a 290Pro soon as the Non Refs are out, but ive been increasingly thinking of while im at it, swapping my i5 2500K @4.4ghz and Asrock Ex4 Gen3 mobo + Ram for an AM3 Asus Mobo and an AMD 9370.
*snipped*
Any thoughts on the above and what kinda temps im going to be looking at? the other option is to put something like an Alpenfohn K2 Mount Doom in to cool it all.
The FX is a good CPU, its cheap, delivers great performance for the <insert currency here> spent, but should not be paired with anything more powerfull than a 7970 in non mantle games(based on the information available stating that mantle reduces the cpu requirements), anything better will bottlenecked more often than not, maybe not much but as an example my 780 has been as low as 65ish % usage in some modern titles..
So my point is, if you want something like the 290 you better have the grunt to support it and even if the 8350 OCed to 4,8 will beat a 2500k its not worth a change to the AM3+ platform at this point, due to multiple reason:
1) The performance increase will not be that big if at all in a lot of games considering your current OC on the 2500k.
2) You will be getting an old chipset, meaning no new features over your 1156 socket.
3) You will experience irregular framerates from time to time in games that have not been optimized with the fx chip in mind(hopefully we will see less of this in the future)
Reasons to buy an FX-x3x0:
1) Need a good/cheap replacement for a dead PC.
2) You are still using something from the Core 2 due days.
3) You are on a budget and you need a new gaming rig and dont currently have a working i5-i7 system.
4) You are into VM and need a cheaper than x79 solution.
I have an FX-8350 sitting next to me(which is basicly a 9370), been darn happy with her running a my main rig at 4,8. She is running as a 8 core server now as of monday the 9th this month. Its a solid piece of tech, but recommending it over something like a 4770k now that z87 boards are so darn cheap even if the 4770k is about 100-120 pounds more(even less since your considering the 9370) is just silly in my head since we are talking a complete platform upgrade anyway. If you had a capable AM3+ board already and only needed the CPU it would be a different story.
I have benched my old 8350@4,8 ghz and my new i7 4770k@stock and as soon as im done with the OCed results as well ill be posting them here and it should be very clear why you do not want to spend money on a 9370 for gaming.