No different to companies such as Excaliberpc.com who used to sell AMD processors with known steppings. (The overclocking fraternity typically has ideas as to which steppings are better than others) - oh and yes they marked up the price As to the Tcase max thing - ironically the OC community actually are theorising that the higher the TCase max the better as although it runs hotter it overclocks better as the perception is that leakage is lower. Besides I would think individual purchases of cpus v complete systems is a ratio less than 1:10.