Nothing wrong with letting others pay for the bleeding edge, that is for sure. You are 100% right about drivers.
I might be wrong, but I think the FM2 socket is for APUs (combo CPU and video chip) and the AM3 socket is for (CPU+ video card) based systems.
IMHO, the risk you take combining an APU + video card is that all of the software has to really work together across both video processing setups or it sort of wastes at least one of them. In windows that might be fine, but in Linux that can be more challenging. No idea if the game has to be smart enough to run that combo or not. I am not saying it won't work, I just try to avoid complicated setups.
My son built up a gaming desktop last year using an AM3 board (it was around $80) + FX8370 + decent video card. You could also use about anything in that entire processor series and it will do ok.
He didn't over clock it, but did use pretty fast ram, which is critical for AMD based platforms, not so much for Intel platforms based on the reviews and comparisons I read.
I need to ask him exactly which mother board it was, but the only real issue was that the video card took up two slots so the wifi card didn't fit. He ended up just using CAT5 to the dsl modem and it runs very stable and very fast.
The video card appears to be doing most of the work on the games that he plays and the only latency he really notices is internet latency.
If the game you are playing doesn't need as many threads, the FX4300 is a surprisingly strong performer due to the large L3 cache and just $70 at newegg. I think the only reason that he didn't use the 4300 was that he wanted to create videos of his game play, that that took it over the 4300 thread limit.
I can't say much about what he spent on the computer parts, he worked for a semester at Target full time + and earned it all himself.
Similarly, I am giving it a few months to get beat up by the gamers and figure out which motherboards are actually stable. So many times processors get a bad rap for what are actually MB or some kind of system combination stability problem.
I have been waiting a long time for the AM4 platform and can give it a bit more time.
Depending on how things go, I might do a father and son build of this thing with a modest video card, then let him take the best parts of both systems as his new game rig - end of the year Christmas gift.