The only problem with this strategy is that you end up paying for a $70 cooler which defeats the cost savings of the cheaper CPU.
It's not a problem if you can use the cooler on a number of different CPUs. I've already used my nh-d14 on two different CPUs, and if I ever get another one for this board, it'll be on its third mount.
Welcome, to the world of budget overclocking. Overclocking really lost its heart when you can just throw large amount of money at your PC. Go back to the old days when the point is to try to squeeze as much out of a cheap celeron as possible. I assure you you will gain more satisfaction out of overclocking a $40 E3300 combo with a piece-of-crap motherboard to 4Ghz, or unlocking 2 extra cores and 6mb L3 cache of your 5000+, than you will ever have from an expensive 1366 setup.
Or you could just run F@H, then you'll never have too many MHz.
The only exception I take to that is that both Intel and AMD seem to be doing a fairly good job of putting "interesting" tech into some of their mid-to-high end processors that you just don't get to play with on the low end.
For example:
1). Intel's current-gen budget processor is Clarksdale, and the cheapest one of those you can get (not counting the Pentium) is the i3-530, and that thing will give you major headaches with RAM/QPI speeds past a BCLK of around 200-210. You have to take the lowest RAM and QPI multis you can pick after that point, which leads to horrendous memory/memory controller performance unless you can really crank the BCLK. If you step up to an i5-750, you won't have that problem. Or you could buy the K-class Clarksdale or just one with a higher multi to try and top out the cores at a low BCLK, but at that point it hardly seems worth it when the 750 is there for a similar price.
Nevertheless, were I going the Intel route, I would feel cheated by owning and running a 530 (or 540 or 550) unless I went balls-out on the BCLK, and doing that can be hit-or-miss.
2). There are plenty of fun AMD processors to OC, but if you want the best stepping for overclocking, right now, the minimum price of entry is $200 for the x6 1055T. Want an E0-stepping Sempron? No dice! Even a C3 Sempron is hard to come by; I have found only one etailer carrying the OEM-only Sempron 145 (C3), and they want $41 + shipping for it!
Bottom line is that when you buy cheap these days, you're buying into limitations in most cases. There's always something else to go for in the higher price brackets that makes overclocking just that much more satisfying. It's not like in the old Celeron 300a days when 90-95% of the CPU you wanted was available in the lower price ranges just waiting to be coaxed to performance levels on par with Intel's latest and greatest.
I don't know about you, but I have oced quad cores with the goal of improved performance in highly threaded apps that benefited from all 4 cores.
Gonna have to agree with you there. Multi-threaded benchmarks like WPrime have become popular as well . . . it isn't all SuperPi anymore.