My impression is that for the trouble you get buying better coolers and motherboards and finding stable configurations by trial and error you may as well spend that extra money on a more powerful CPU or GPU and run it at stock speeds. You gain a couple of percent, and while your CPU might not die before you replace it it does increase power consumption (so: money) a lot. So, a sneaky option if you aren't the one paying the electricity bills. And your computer might crash more often. When I buy PC parts, I tend to stick to certain power ranges, for example 65W CPU. Also, not all faults are fatal for hardware and silent faults might cause data corruption.
Do you overclock any of your home computer components? What are your reasons?
Do any of you overclock workplace computers?
1. You find it fun. This is the major reason. People like doing the experimentation and work.
2. You really need that tiny bit of extra performance but can't upgrade your hardware, because you can't afford it or some other reason (compatibility, company won't approve upgrades, etc.).
I've done overclocking in the past because of the first reason. Only know one person who did it because of the second. It's become much less common now, what with modern PC components being so powerful.
Current PC has a 10600K overclocked, only because I already had the cooling system installed and it uses the same heatsink mount as a 2500K.
I only ever overclocked a CPU for work once back in the late 90s, and that was due to an approaching deadline for a client and the need to process tens of thousands of pdf files.
Most computers these days use virtual memory: physical RAM plus swap. If you want to speed up your machine, it's easier to just bulk up your machine's physical RAM, so that it doesn't have to depend on any (slow) swap space.