New Quad Core for Rig

Hello all,

I've been watching for some time the happenings of the CPU world lately, and have finally gotten to the point where I need to build a new gaming rig. I Anticipate some new games I'd like to play (that my current machine won't run) about Mid May.

I think that i'd really like to get a Core 2 Quad Q9450 CPU, with a MB that supports 1600 FSB, and overclock it just a touch to get a little more juice out of it.

Anyhow, It seems like everyone is always sold out of these chips, both retail and OEM. Whenever I do see one for sale, it seems like its for an artificially inflated price due to this "shortage".

Does anyone have any info on if this shortage of Q9450s is going to blow over soon or if Intel is planning to churn more of these things out? Or should I just throw in the towel and get a Q9300 with its lower multiplier and half the L2 cache and concede defeat?

How much performance would I be giving up going down to the less overclockable Q9300 and going from 12 MB of L2 Cache to only 6 MB of L2 cache?

I don't want to hold my breath forever to get a Q9450, but I'd hate to feel like I'm short selling my system but getting a drastically inferior processor.

Any opinions, or perhaps leads as to where I might find a Q9450 at a fair price?

I am an experienced Ebayer, but There are things I prefer not to get that way, and I think this CPU is one of them. I'm envisioning some unscrupulous person buying a bunch of Q9450's and Testing them for overclockability and then dumping the ones that didn't do so well on Ebay as "New"

Yeah I saw the MWave one for the past few days, they were about $60 higher for the CPU then the other sites, which is like 15% markup over other retail . But Today they raised the price to $419 and its now out of Stock.

Also Amazon moved their expected "in stock" date out to 1-2 months. It doesn't look like any retailer is going to be getting these any time soon.