If you are just going to be shooting up to 300 yards then the old Winchester 140 gr factory load will do fine for deer. Yes you most likely can improve accuracy a lot with handloads. I have a custom 27 3/4" Shilen barrel Rem 700 264 Win mag that shoots under 1/2 MOA with 130 gr Nosler Accubonds pushed with Retumbo to 3350 fps muzzle velocity. Talk about shooting flat and hitting hard. First deer I shot right at 500 yards away across a NC green soybean field went down dead as a hammer so quick I like to never found it. The buck popped into the field at a trot following a hot doe and he stopped for just a second giving me the shot. After I shot him I thought to myself now just exactly where was he standing when I shot. :rolleyes: Those green waste high soybeans are just an ocean of green. I walked back and forth about an hour until I actually stepped on the buck. That bullet got to that deer the fastest of any round I have ever squeezed the trigger on. I heard the bullet POP almost immediately after the report of the rifle. BOOM POP and empty field. I have killed 20+, lost count, deer with this rifle in the past 4 years and all have been DRT. I traded my hunting buddy out of this rifle. He never keeps anything very long. He had this rifle built and just got it a few days before deer season and just tried it out with some factory WW 140 gr loads and it shot about 1" at 100. He killed a few deer with this load from about 100 out to a little over 300 yards and all were DRT. I had a rifle that was a safe queen that he wanted so we traded.