[twh270]

In my young years I had little understanding of the value of time, and would spend an inordinate amount of time on eking out that last little bit of perfection (whatever "perfect" looked like to me, anyway).

Bragging rights fits in here as well for a certain cohort. "Oh, you got 5.551Ghz, not bad but I'm at 5.5511Ghz".

Another classic example of this is uptime bragging for some linux fans, as a way to both one-up each other and to one-up the Windows community, which (more so in the past) had pretty awful uptimes due to various bugs and the need to reboot after making config changes. (We used to joke: "You have moved your mouse, please reboot Windows for this change to take effect.")

I think most people in this kind of community though just enjoy tinkering and maximizing performance/whatever.