> Overclocking often leads to buying a new cpu, sooner than later. ;-)

"often"?  More like "pretty much never".  Unless you do something really 
crazy/stupid (like setting the core voltage way too high with a specialist 
BIOS) you're not going to fry a CPU.  All processors for a long time now 
have had internal temperature sensors that will shut down the CPU long 
before any damage is done.  Even when the heatsink fell off my old AMD 
XP2400+ it just shut itself down after 30 seconds or so (and the next 50 
times I tried to restart it and reinstall windows before I opened it up!) - 
still works fine today.

> Frankly, I never understood the public obsession with overclocking.

More bang per buck, in some cases it can be quite a significant increase if 
you are lucky.

> Why risk to have an unstable system and invest heavily in cooling hardware 
> instead of just buying a better cpu?

In the majority of cases you can overclock without needing any new hardware 
or having any stability issues.  CPUs are designed to work in absolute worst 
case conditions, 99.9% of the time people are not using them under these 
conditions so they can be overclocked and be perfectly stable.

[Follow-up set to off-topic]

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