Yeah, the last CPU I bought that was worth overclocking was a 2500K, before Z-series motherboards were mandated for K-series chips adding yet more unnecessary cost to getting your "free" performance (that you had to pay extra for)
That P67 board took a 3.3GHz chip to 5.1GHz all core, though at frankly harmful voltages and untenable temperatures for summer. My daily driver OC was 4.8GHz at 1.4V on a NH-U12 air cooler. You were super-unlucky if your 2500K didn't clock to at least 4.5GHz. Most would do that on stock voltage with the wimpy intel boxed cooler.
Since then, overclocking has been taxed excessively at purchase for the snowflake influencers. Through Haswell, Zen2, Zen3 I've not overclocked. AMD may have been less restrictive about overclocking but you still have to buy a premium model and the 3600X was poor performance/$ compared to the 3600. My 3900X and 5800X have PBO+ disabled. Regular boosting within the TDP is plenty for me and a silent, stable 4.5-4.8GHz boost is better than 4.95GHz of overvolted madness and kiss goodbye to all of your power savings and quiet operation.
Maybe I'm old, or maybe I'm just not dumb enough to throw performance/$ and performance/W out of the window just to get an extra 10% at most. Having the fastest is pointless anyway because tomorrow something faster will get launched with the never-ending march of progress.
We're both old and we apply old logic to our frame of the world. So far I've found that legacy logic to work a LOT better than jumping from one outrage into the next because you turned out to be wrong in the new logic of social media. You know, it keeps ya sane to go slow.
But yeah I feel exactly the same way about overclocking. What is the effin point if you're going to spend more on board and cooling to even get any semblance of an OC out a chip? Isn't the net result a loss there?! I never understood the rationale there. Just buy a faster chip. And back in the day, you could actually BUY the fastest possible chip and then see how far you could take it, because Intel didn't do it for you to begin with. So you'd chase the optimal performance on your own, with no guarantees, and then the expense of 'more cooling' looks quite different, to me at least: you're pushing that boundary.
But in the current world you're not even pushing boundaries, its just a game of 'how much voltage will it take before I see smoke'. Efficiency? What? I mean they already get out of the box clocked way out of the optimal curve, if you'd try for efficiency, you might as well just buy a lower SKU. Its like they literally monetized every piece of the stack for every type of buyer, but still try to sell the old idea of some sort of advantage.
And somehow, its working too. I get it. If you never knew how it really was, what you get today is your reality - there was never something else.
Companies know this. Its why we get all those reboot games too. Redefine reality so you can finally ditch those old nagging bastards telling you how shit everything's become because of commerce and profit drive. This is also why groups of consumers find themselves on opposite ends of a discussion (example: steam vs EGS, paid vs unpaid modding, lenience on MTX and pay to win, lenience on Pre-orders and early access, selling out to cloud versus owned).
