Now before I say anything let me make it clear I'm not a fanboy, I have an FX-8320 myself. It's not overkill. As an AMD user I'm not going to sit here and act like it's superior to Intel when it's not. No doubt that Intel has superior single threaded performance. Overclocking the core frequency of the FX chips past 4Ghz could help a bit. Some are even on par with Intel i5 processors at high enough speeds. AMD processors are nice if you are on a budget and would like a better price/performance ratio and plan on overclocking. FX-series chips overclock real well with some nice cooling. Downgrading processor to invest in case fans? For one those are dirt cheap and two they're going to do nothing towards performance aside from possibly keeping case temps down a few degrees which in turn will help cool the components a few degrees, at most. Wouldn't cost that much to get a few Corsair SP120 fans, not to where it would warrant taking the budget out of core components. Just my .02 @ OP - If I were you I would get the Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 instead for a little more if you can fit it in your budget. Would be a nice board to overclock that processor down the road if you wanted, assuming you get better cooling as these chips run hot.