Introduction
Its my first time to buy a computer of my own, the computers I usually use are not mine. I’m just a plain user. But now, I have my own that I can be proud of. This is to let you know of my story from being an ordinary user, to overclocker dude and hardware expert.

Searching for relevant data
I’ve been working with computers for 6 years of my life plus 4 years in college (by the way I graduated from AMA Computer College, home of the "I Love You" virus. :-)). That’s a whopping 10 years of work with computers without knowing what their specs are! At first, I didn’t know what specs I am going to build with. But then, my internet access in the office opened a whole new world for me. And that’s computers, computers, and even more computers. For the motherboard I seeked out ASUS, processor INTEL and AMD, soundcard CREATIVE, and a myriad of many others concerning the parts I was going to buy.

A secret found
For others who don’t know it. "Overclocking" is still a secret (of course, its not a secret anymore if you know it already. :-)).  While sifting through the vast amount of data before me, searching for hardware parts, I saw this word: OVERCLOCKING. Being the high tech researcher type of person that I am, I was readily amused by this overclocking thing. What is this "Overclocking"?

Web sites discovered
Immediately, I clicked through all of the hyper-linked pages of the search results window and brought me to popular reviews and overclocking sites, Ars Technica, Tom’s Hardware, Anandtech, Sharky Extreme, BX Boards, Hard|OCP, Motherboards.org, Overclockers.com, Via Hardware, H-Oda and many others, which host a lot of overclocking topics, from processor to memory overclocking.

My calling
As I read through all these web site’s reviews and stories, I ended up imagining things on my own.  What if I overclock the computer that I was about to buy?  That would be real cool considering that I don’t have to pay for the extra megahertz I acquired from overclocking.

Selecting the path
In this computer world of ours, you have to choose your own path.  It’s whether you go INTEL or go AMD.  Cyrix I think is not an option here because I don’t see any Cyrix processor being overclocked. So, I started researching again. I’m longing for the ultimate processor manufacturer that yields the most overclocking results. By searching through the internet, I found a web site with a CPU database. This cpu database is a container of numerous overclocking entries by many overclockers around the world. The web site is OVERCLOCKERS.COM. As I was searching for AMD and INTEL overclocking data, I noticed that there were more entries for INTEL rather than AMD. And I also noticed that for a single processor, there are more entries for the CELERON processor than any other type. Judging from this discovery and what I read from the many overclocking web sites, I discovered my processor, INTEL CELERON.

Selecting the motherboard path
When it comes to the motherboard, what came to mind was ASUS, EPOX and ABIT.  In the office, the most stable motherboard was ASUS. By the way, I’m from the EDP department of a banking firm in the Philippines. However, I cannot judge that ASUS is the best because that's just what we have in the office. I turned to the Internet again for answers on what was the most stable motherboard with a lot of overclocking options. As I have read on the Internet, I noticed that ASUS is always number one in stability, but not when it came to overclocking, and that ABIT was also stable AND with a lot of overclocking options. EPOX is usually unheard of in the many sites I found. That’s why I removed EPOX from my list. Judging from the many awards that was given to ASUS, I found my brand. What kind of ASUS board would I like to have? Well, it should be nothing less than the newest model out. At that time, the latest was the P3C-2000 and P3V4X. Based on my query on these boards, the P3C is far more expensive than a P3V4X so I bought the latter. Thank GOD I didn't buy the P3C-2000 because after a month, news of the i820's MTH bug came out. Then there was the RAMBUS throughput problem. As for my P3V4X, I am very happy with it, knowing that this is an award winning board from the most stable board manufacturer. For the features of this board, please click here. Or click here for the OCManila review.