I've never heard any valid reason for overclocking, other than people looking to ruin a perfectly good computer or "just because I can". Even overclocking a little is going to increase the failure rate exponentially, and yield very little results. Errors abound on overclocked hardware.
Naw, overclocking doesn't change the failure rates at all. It's the heat that hurts components, not clock speed- and even then, it's the capacitors that typically fail, not the microchips. Whether you overclock or not, you just have to keep everything cool.
The errors are mostly due to people pushing their computers to the limit, not due to component failure. If going back into bios and raising the voltage or dialing the clock back down fixes the lock-up, there wasn't any damage.
