Depends what you were doing with it. The piledriver only beat the Intels in heavily multi threaded workloads like media encoding which is why it was popular with media creator workstations on a budget, but for most consumer real world tasks at the time, like video games, Intel was way ahead in performance even though it was more expensive.

The piledriver would win the bang/buck competition back then because of the 6-core part was reasonably priced and unlocked for overclocking, so people would overclock them to beat the more expensive (locked?) 4-c/8-t Intels at a lower price, but that ignored the costs of massive extra power draw over the Intel, the need for beefier more expensive coolers, and the more expensive AMD motherboards with beefier MOSFET power delivery stages built to withstand the higher power draws of the Piledriver, so in the end the real bang/buck wasn't as huge as people were making it out to be.