Honestly, when you get into hardcore overclocking and you're getting to the point where you're risking frying stuff, I have done that (well in the past, I don't overclock at all anymore).

I have never overclocked and have no need to - frankly never saw the point. I always buy new equipment and don’t want to risk frying it! The last system I built is conservative and power friendly but still fast so I am good

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It was fun in my youth. Getting 50% frequency boost (Celeron 300A), flashing the top line bios onto a cheaper 9700/9800 to get a 9700PRO/9800PRO for $150 less than you could otherwise get it, etc. Definitely can be worth it, but once you go to far, you're spending more on cooling and replacement parts because you fried something than you would have spent just buying faster parts to begin with.

I remember when the Celeron 300A came out, and the top processors were 500 MHz, but the 300A was so nice just 1 switch and they were running @450 MHz. So a super cheap $80 chip running almost neck and neck with $300 chips. Good times. Yes, nowadays there's a SIGNIFICANTLY less return to overclocking since chips simply are so much more powerful and generally can't be pushed ANYWHERE near as far as they could without sub-ambient cooling.

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Yes, it is a good question. Either I can overclock or pay $1000 (or more??).

The problem is with modern processors you've got core count dictating the price more than frequency. So the entry to the high end CPU's right now are 8-core 16-thread for around $300 (3700x). Go cheaper than that, and simply put, you're getting fewer cores/threads. No amount of overclocking will make up for that. So you could get the 3700x and overclock it to match something faster like the 3800x, but no 3600x (6/12 core/thread) will be able to match the 3700x in overall processing power simply because it has fewer active cores. And by the same count, the 3700x will never be able to match the 3900x (12/24 core/thread), because again, it simply is lacking the core count to compete, and no overclocking can change that. So you're somewhat limited with overclocking since if you decide you need 8 cores, you can't go UNDER the $300 price range as nothing there has the core count you need (as an aside, I REALLY wish AMD would release the Ryzen 9-3900 retail...65-watt 12core/24thread).

So, the last build I did was with slightly older components and cost me about $900 because one of my kids gave me a new motherboard:

MSI Z240A-Pro MB (was a gift)
Intel i7-7700
Noctua NH D15 cooling fan
Seasonic 650 watt power supply
NZXT H500 case
Corsair Vengance LPX 32GB memory

I had my own SSDs already so used those.

The board can be overclocked but it is very quick and I personally saw no point. It runs very cool and is relatively power efficient because I chose the lower wattage CPU. Yes, it's not AMD but the board was an Intel so went that route.

Quite frankly, at the time that board was released, Intel still was the way to go. Ryzen had JUST been released, drivers in linux were bad to nonexistant, and noone knew if they'd get better.

Well then my decision was justified I have actually not used an AMD CPU since the K5 days. Next build I may do one, but nothing insane in terms of performance, I want absolute stability.