Marcuz

The main thing is the clock speed, I assume it would be 1600 Mhz. Some motheerboards only allow your memory to be clocked to 1600 MHz. Go on the website of the motherboard and see what memory profiles your motherboard can handle. Clocking the Patriot Viper 3 to something like 2400 MHz would be the best to get maximum performance form your RAM.

What RAM do you have exactly, some RAM are better at coping with higher voltages.

I use SpeedFan, it is easy to set up and you can monitor and control Fan speeds. This eliminates the need of going into your BIOS. This is the download link: http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php This is a configuration video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crgDnjyfc2w I hope this helps!

I believe AMD will be a safe option to go for considering your budget, most FPS games are GPU intensive so you should be thinking more on what graphics card would be beneficial instead of CPU. However, Phenom series are powerful and cheap, good gaming experience. I haven't heard positive reviews on AMD Bulldozer series so I would avoid them. Specifically, what games do you play exactly?