With my limited experience with Pi, I’m not the best person suited to answer your question.
Since I almost immediately, after starting using my device, began fiddling with the config.txt, I have kind of lost the reference point to the unclocked performance of the cpu.
Currently I have these values
# Overclocking
over_voltage=8
arm_freq=2250
gpu_freq=700
and I use cpu power scaling set to ondemand.
Under moderate load the cpu seldom peaks at 2300 Mhz and with my moderately inefficient cooling, I get reasonable temps way below the “dreaded” 85 degrees.
I would like to believe, or rather I am under the impression, that the system is quite responsive, when launching apps etc and the cpu bursts up to 2300 but this is only subjective impression. I haven’t really done extensive benchmarking and timing to get some factual figures to go by. Perhaps I’ll do that when I find some time later on. For now I have a feeling it is working quite well.
Here is a screeshot from of a video from explainingcomputers.com: