I personally have the 8350 and I've had no problems using it to steam in the past or to render videos. Having the extra cores do help! Games still don't use all 8 cores, so allows you to steam fairly easily. As for a motherboard I am running an ASUS-M5a97R2.0 it's a 970 chipset board and has yet to fail me. Even though I think the temperature sensors are a bit dodgy on the board now.