Originally posted by: gobucks
Asus, Chaintech, and DFI all have nforce4 boards that overclock well. I have mine up to 283MHz (i'm not going further right now cause I'd have to up vcore, and i have stock cooling), and DFI boards can supposedly hit 318MHz and above. All it needs to support is a 300MHz FSB to hit the max of 2.7GHz with the 3000+. Still, with lower overclocks (2.3-2.4GHz), the 10x multi is nice cause you can buy cheap RAM and run your FSB slower. I'd go 3000+, but there are reasons for both chips.
You can always use cheap ram even if your fsb is at 300, you can run your ram at 200 mhz. Anandtech performance tests have proven that the difference between running memory at DDR533 and DDR400 is 1-2% in gaming (when cpu speed is kept the same). And dividers don't have any perofrmance hit in athlon64, therefore I'd say that paying $150 extra for high end memory is not worth it. All you need is cheap ram that has decent timings at stock speed (for example, kingston hyperX can do 2-3-2-6 at DDR400) but doesn't need to be able to run at DDR500 and above. And you don't need special cooler as most a64 run well below 60C (which is fine) even at high overclocks of 2600-2700 mhz with the stock cooler, and getting a better cooler doesn't change your overclock limitation (but it does reduce the temps by 3-5 degrees). Given the fact that retail A64 costs only $5 more than OEM and has longer warranty, it's better to get the retail version and just use the stock cooler. Regarding 3200+, I think it has a slightly better chance to overclock, but you still have good chance with 3000+, so I don't think the 3200+ premium is worth it.
For example, look at the sig of the guy above me: he got a 3000+ probably for $150 or so, but then he got PC4000 ram for probably $300. Does it make sense to spend more on RAM than on your cpu and motherboard combined ? probably not, but let's see what he gains from it: he runs the memory at 283 mhz (DDR566) at 3-3-3-10 2T. But he could get cheap memory for $100 and run it with a divider at around 210 mhz 2.5-3-3-8 1T and get very close performance in gaming (within 1-2%), or even better because of the lower latencies. So maybe he could have spent that extra wasted cash on a decent drive, like a raptor 74GB sata/150, and a audigy2 zs which reduces cpu usage in gaming thus increasing frame rates by at least 5%, or better yet, spend an extra $100 on a better video card and get x800xl 256MB which will give you almost double performance in some games, especially at high resolutions.
So you see, some people are hung up on some ideas, and usually that ends up costing them a lot of money and giving much lower perofrmance......