Then you didn’t do it right. Or your hardware didn’t have the power, thermal, or silicon headroom to increase performance.

Stable overclocks will net you consistent and measurable improvements in performance. Even if they aren’t very big.

RAM XMP profiles are a good example, they are basically a pre-configured RAM overclock, and absolutely make a difference. You should ALWAYS enable XMP in your BIOS.

When it comes to CPUs and GPUs, things are less clear nowadays, because many modern chips will actually overclock themselves, automatically. So you may not end up doing anything that the chip wasn’t already doing on its own. You might even end up making it worse.

To see a positive difference, you might actually have to change your settings in ways that can seem counter-intuitive.

Like lowering your voltages, instead of increasing them. This can help the chip run cooler, which the automatic overclocking will detect as an opportunity to run higher clocks.

But overclocking is not a placebo. Playing with your hardware can have very real benefits.

For example, my old gaming laptop had a CPU that would run hotter than the GPU, it wasn’t overheating or anything, but it made the GPU throttle because they shared the same heatsink.

By undervolting the CPU (same speed, but using less voltage) I was able to run the CPU cool enough to significantly boost the performance of the GPU.