brad808, I think you just made my point... "leave it overnight", and, "do that a few times to tweak things and get optimal settings".
That takes time, and if its time where I'm not able to be 100% confident that the machine is rock stable, that's time I'm not able to sit at it and do work.
Compare that to "I spent an extra $75, and it took me zero additional time". IMO, that makes it a no-brainer; I'm spending the extra $75 on it. When I was younger I was happy to spend hour after hour twiddling the settings and tweaking it to get it just right, but I ain't got that kind of time any more. Well, I've still got the same 24hrs in a day as I did before, but I'd rather be spending my time doing other things than sitting here tweaking a PC.
Well of course anyone could argue that their time is worth x amount of dollars and that something isn't worth it to them. That's going to be different on an individual basis and how much free time or money they actually have. The same argument could be made though that if someone didn't have a lot of free time and like tinkering and customizing they wouldn't be on a website about building their own arcade controls to play outdated video games

Besides for me there has never personally been any time that I've spent sitting working at my arcade machine, all my work is done on other computers.
There is no point being fixated on the fact that "your saving $75" just because I started with a "crappy cpu", my point was just that I was able to achieve the same performance of a higher grade/ higher price point cpu quite easily out of the lower price/ lower grade cpu. Would it make you feel better if I said I took a $300 cpu and made it perform like a $600 cpu? Or $500 cpu perform like $1000? Then you would save $500

. There are a lot of people that do that and can get extreme overclocks but I'm not really into that. I wouldn't call myself good at overclocking at all actually.
Before the cave shooters got released my main mame machine was running at stock clock. Installed the new cave games, saw that they were kickass and realised my computer wasn't fast enough to run them. Ended up buying cpu fan, did some tweaks and the games became playable. Once I saw the clear performance gain on those games which took them to running 100% I went back to the list of games I removed due to them stuttering through performance and was able to find a bunch more that were now working 100%
Again it's not for everyone, I get it. For me definitely worth it. I've spent far more time playing the games that became playable, then I ever did adjusting bios settings to achieve the playability.