Yeah, you are right but I recommended that because I thought that he might be needing RAM, now without the RAM, I would go with something like 8320 + Asrock 970 Extreme 3 board / GIgabyte 970 UD3 / Asus M5A97.
All three are good board with Gigabyte one being the best one among them.
Okay, this is what I would finally recommend, since you already have DDR3 RAM.
CPU : AMD FX 6300
Motherboard : Asrock 970 Extreme 4 = Awesome board for the price.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/lmqa
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/asus-motherboard-m5a99xevor20
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/asus-motherboard-m5a97evor20
These two boards are what I would recommend, since the 990 chipset is actually cheaper ATM for whatever reason, I'd get that... the difference between the Asus 970 EVO and every other 970 is the power delivery that's capable of overclocking an 8 core processor... that's why it's so highly recommended...
If you want to do "general tech fiddling", I suggest staying away from the ASUS boards. There have been reports of faulty IOMMU implementations in the BIOS for AMD parts (corrupted ACPI IVRS tables), which prevents certain types of virtualization techniques.
Only a reason for concern if you intend to use linux, since Windows is so ancient it doesn't even know about IOMMU.
Thanks for all of the feedback everyone! I really appreciate it. I have it narrowed down to these two boards:
They seem to be pretty evenly matched, but I'm sure there is someone out there that knows something that I don't. What does everyone think?
Also, I'm still not sure about the 6300 vs 6350 vs 8320. I've already gone over my budget by choosing one of these boards, but should I save a few more pennies and look at the higher CPU options too?