newb questions: how to get the goods?

I've built a couple of systems in my lifetime and snooped many tech sites for info but one question I have never asked is how do people find particular CPU's that yield good OC's? (ie C1 stepping and such. Same goes for the ram with low cas ratings/timings. Do you just call resellers and ask if they have certain spec ratings of whatever? Know someone in the biz?
I am building the system below as a game rig and I want to make sure I can run it into 3 ghz+ with air cooling. If you look at my sig you can tell I have not had too much luck at OC'ing and want to get it right this time before I dump my hard earned grand.

Asus P4PE/L i845PE DDR333
P4 2.66 ghz
Corsair XMS 512 PC3500 DDR433??
Gainward Ti4600 Ultra/750XP Golden Samp
Cooler not picked yet. Thinking Vantec Aeroflow looks pretty advanced.

Id like to skimp a little on the ram do you think PC3500 is overkill?
Info is appreciated

XMS overkill?

XMS overkill? Never!!!! I'm very proud of the memory i bought from them I will recomend it to any one, try getting 400DDR instead to save a little money and upgrade your Ti4600 to a Radeon 9700 Pro.

Like this is my score and im not happy with the end result of the video card but as you can see my ram 3200XMS Corsair is slightly whoopin RAMBUS. hehehehe

Good Luck buddy.

Kam

XMS overkill? Never!!!! I'm very proud of the memory i bought from them I will recomend it to any one, try getting 400DDR instead to save a little money and upgrade your Ti4600 to a Radeon 9700 Pro.

Click to expand...

Ya, I had the 9700pro recently, Tried all the drivers but could not get the thing to play any of my games on my current machine, 3DMark scores kicked major *** though.

edit: something crazy happened....

edit: again.

hi, and welcome to the forums.

I just set up the asus p4pe....with a 1.8a and corsair xms3200c2.

my thoughts on this mobo is it sucks.

to make matters worse I must have the worst 1.8a around.

maybe this 1.8a would be OK if not for this mobo.....let me explain.

first it overvolts the vcore alot.
this might not be so bad if it would just hold this voltage at full lode.
at 1.725v bios- I get 1.79 real at idle....yet at full lode it dips down to 1.68v every now and then.
this is messed up.

I'm using the true 430w myself...and never had this on my th7II rambus mobo.

I cant say that this cpu flat out stinks.....this mobo should be hot, but the voltage dips.
plus my 12v,5v,and 3v rails are low also.

I'm way too tired to fool around with it, but I hate this.

I wish peeps would stop saying all the nice things about this mobo and start talking about the crappy stuff.

mica

btw...this xms3200 is the greatest.

I need to change my siggy

How to go about getting a C1? Some chips only ship in C1 varieties (ie the 2.66ghz chip). Sometimes vendors will sell very OCable parts (for a premium), pcnut is a good example of this.

Ram is just rated at a certain speed. Period. So you can buy XMS3200 or whatever.

The rest is luck of the draw. I've never been extremely lucky (1.6 to 2.3 and 2.4 to 2.78), but that doesnt stop me.

well now that I had a little time with both this mobo (p4pe) and 1.8a....the mobo is not that bad.

the CPU stinks....Oh well.

mica

How to go about getting a C1? Some chips only ship in C1 varieties (ie the 2.66ghz chip). Sometimes vendors will sell very OCable parts (for a premium), pcnut is a good example of this.

Click to expand...

Exactly the answer I was looking for! Thank You.