Originally Posted by
chuckskull
For me it was always a bang for buck thing and I do not have many bucks. For example my processor, cost me £40 new. At the time to match it's over clocked performance with an off the shelf chip would have cost £900+ and now a couple of years later I wouldn't be able to play the games I want without that overclock or spending more money, it's stock speed is below most triple A titles minimum requirements. This price difference dwarfs the energy cost and a faster off the shelf chip will use this much power or very near it anyway, as for warranty concerns, if you do it carefully you will have plenty of warning before you do permanent damage.
In fact the basic process used in overclocking are performed on most chips in the factory(slowly increasing clockspeed and voltage), this is called binning, a machine will constantly up clockspeed and find the limit of the chip, then later the chip will be sold below that limit, how much below merely depends on demand and chip yield.
Is it worth it? Well I can run my processor stably at double it's stock speed, I actually run it a little lower just to keep the temps down a bit. This has allowed me for 2 and a half years to run a perfectly respectable gaming rig on a £40 CPU, the price of one game. That's value for money right there and without it PC gaming would probably be off limits to me unless I wanted to wait a couple of years for the hardware to catch up/come down in price.