re ABS - yea thats typical. I have a love hate relationship with ABS ;) Getting an enclosure for the printer can help - something along the lines of
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:55065 but be careful to not over-heat things ;)
re speeds, what are you using for print and non-print speeds? I would recommend printing at 20-30 mm/sec range and set your non-print movement speeds down around 100 or lower.
You can look at my old marlin config. Note the marlin version I was running on there is probably pretty old so it may not line up with your config positionally.
You should be able to issue M commands to change these live.
My go-tos:
If you have not already done so run and save your PID tuning. That will help with your bed temps and also with extrusion ( you will likely notice the temps fluctuate if you have not done this )
One thing I noticed with cura on z moves, it will issue the axis movements with crazy high feed rates and cause stepper motors to squeal. Configuring those max feed rate settings will be very important ( and iirc you can’t restrict the layer change speed in cura )
Set your feed rates low and work your way up. Get things printing smoothly on lower feed rates ( yes, its like watching paint dry I know ;) )
You can also play some games with your start gcode and play with different values until you find what is right - then put it in the Configuration.h and / or eprom. I *highly* recommend getting your configuration.h file synced up just in case you fry the board ;) Also lets you switch slicer software without worrying
Bill