Jiggz brings up a good point. Well, others brought it up, but he made it clearer. There are two types of overclockers. The pennypinchers and the hobbyists. If you can get by with the stock fan and pick up a few mhz, great, no problem, got 50mhz for free. Several have said the new celerons still do 150% overclock, I was under the impression it was rather hit or miss with them. The 533's, some 566's, beyond that you had to be real lucky.
Which goes back to my point - here I am, hitting the forums daily, spending a few minutes browsing through, many hours combined over the years and I still am not sure about this example. And then there's always the fluke (some 300A's didn't do 450). So for the average guy coming home after work and reading up just to find out of he can overclock, putting in the time to pick the motherboard that'll let him do it, etc, there's TIME used to calculate. I've got the time. Most of us do. But if we were to take the time we've spent reading these forums and convert that to cash at say $20/hr most of us could probably buy a brand new rig right now. The vast majority of computer users don't ever look at tweak sites, they don't find them interesting, and when you compute the time we devote to them it doesn't pay on a straight time/savings scale. Throw entertainment value in, it does.
The hobbyists, that's another thing altogether. It's often cheaper to just buy a faster CPU to start with than to break out the peltiers, watercooling, etc, but it's no fun.
Just saying for a whole 80bux difference in my earlier example, most people would rather just work a couple of hours of overtime every few years and avoid researching constantly to keep up with the changes. If you're one who finds it entertaining to read this stuff (like most of us do) then it's a positive/positive thing.
Like HansXP said, as long as it does the job, who cares what the # is? Car example is perfect. Hell, when I was 18 I drove a Camaro. Poured a few grand into that thing tinkering. Bought more aluminum from Edelbrock than I'll ever buy from Globalwin, never got it how I wanted, but still did it because I enjoyed it then. Now I drive a Geo Metro, hauls me back and forth cheaply and dependably, that's all I care about at the moment. Still overclock, still tinker with the computer, someday I'll probably lose interest in it and find a new distraction again. If that's not ok with some, that's their problem, not mine. Never knew it bugged some to know others aren't overclocking, I couldn't care less what others do to their computers. For the hobbyist the economics are a minor detail, from a pure economy standpoint it doesn't make sense for most.
--Mc