I'm disappointed. In some ways, this is rather what I expected, but scaled a little down from what I hoped. Bulldozer offers remarkable improvements in certain work loads, but apparently not the ones of greatest interest to gamers (and many other Tom's readers); I'm going to say I called this one in a recent post based on how the architecture looked to my semi-educated eyes, but I'm not happy about it at all. With the improvements in memory bandwidth, I'd be interested to see how Crossfire / SLI will perform on a 900-series chipset mobo compared to prior generations, but I don't think AMD fanboys should hope for [much] vindication. It's a step forward in some areas, and may bode well for the future, but is a letdown today. At current prices, I don't feel compelled to upgrade from my 970BE.
I am almost irritated at the essentially insignificant improvement in power use, though I'll withhold final judgement until multiple mobos are tested in a roundup, to see if some are notably better than others.
This is not to say I regret choosing AMD in my recent primary build; my choices were heavily influenced by the 990FX chipset's features and connectivity options, and I'd like to think I'd do it the same way, but I was rather hoping for a performance jump out of Bulldozer.