Terrain Vertex Buffer

I am trying to decide between brute force and CLOD; brute force seems like the way to go, since my terrain will not be too extensive, but I would like to work with CLOD for the sake of learning. Anyway, I was trying to decide how to optimize the rendering method, and I came up with two ideas: one is to just render the whole thing with triangle strips ala brute force, and the other is to use index buffers. I came up with this idea to use index buffers: I''ll have a vertex buffer with every vertex in the scene, then for each triangle that the CLOD algorithm outputs, I''ll have another algorithm that can generate the index. Has this method been implemented before, and how well / fast does it draw?