Why do people buy top of line chips to clock with?

[Captain Fizz]

Hello folks,

Now, since the T-Bred B's, I've always bought the slowest CPU of the current production and clocked it to over the highest available.
(All on air)

So getting an XP2100 T-Bred B up to over 2GHz IIRC.
XP2500-M to 2.38GHz
X2 2800 to 2.66GHz.

Yet I've noticed people buying XP3200's and getting nearly the same speeds. Or X2 4400's and getting the same or lower clocks.
There seems to be a tiny difference between the clockability of the bottom of the range and top of the range CPU's.
(Sorry - had very limited experience with intel)

So why is it people shell out much £££ for the top of the line CPU's that to me, clock exactly the same as the lowest end?
(Ignoring Cache sizes, you would then just buy the lowest end chip with the higher cache size)

I always recommend peeps get the lowest end and put a 'safe/easy' clock on it.
How much of a benefit is there (if any) in getting a top end CPU to clock with?

Thanks.

 

[Captain Fizz]

So basically there's less chance of getting a bad clocker, (I've been lucky) and cache sizes are the main reasons...

With the NF2 chipset - Multi's may have had a difference too.
(A64 doesn't have nearly as adverse an effect running out of sync)

It just puzzles me quite a bit when I see peeps spend up to £200 more for their CPU's (same cache size) and get the same clocks as me.
The reduced risk of a core which has been speed-binned makes a fair bit of sense tho.

 

[Captain Fizz]

urm with the new breed of c2d's the lower clocked stock chips (6300/6400) are clocking just as high as the 6600's in most cases sometimes more and often on lower voltage!

More cache = less likely to clock as high?
(More heat, more power consumption, more chance of irregularities on the chip due to increased number of transistors...)

I know one of the cores on my X2 will do 2.8 no problems. (Possibly more)
Just the 2nd core only does 2.666. So with dual core, you can only clock as high as the slowest CPU...

 

[Captain Fizz]

You can use Wintasks pro to assign all processes to a single core.
So I assumme there will be other programs to do it too.
(It's my first core that's groovy!)