Multi tasking is something a person describes as doing. A person can single task and multi task. But a computer always multi tasks. It always runs hundreds of processes and functions. Even if you think you are running a single game, that involves many, many processes executed simultaneously. That requires a lot of power.
Intel had an idea with the Netburst architecture back in the early 2000 that they will soon hit 10 GHz on a single core. This proved to be rather impossible, since the electrical consumption in CPUs grows exponentially with GHz. So 2 cores at 2 GHz consume less power than 1 Core at 4 GHz. And 2 cores at 2 GHz consume half the power that one core at 4 GHz consumes (rough estimate by myself, don't ask me to back it up).
So in the end, it proved more efficient to parallelize processes and run them on a midly GHz-ed chips with larger core count.
But still - not all CPUs are created equal. Not all architectures are equal. AMD and Intel cores are not equal. AMD and Intel MHz are not equal. Not all software is created equal. Some is parallelized - some is not.
In an ideal world:
You have an architecture. You have GHz, You have number of cores.
So it makes more sense to make more cores than to go for GHz.
So lets make up an imaginary number:
CPU performance = [(Architecture Productivity)*Ghz]*Core Count+1/3 per core if Hyper threading is present (because in my own experience Hypet hreaded thread has 1/3 productivity of a real core)
Core2Quad Q6800 (2007) = [(65)*2.93]*(4)
I7 2700K Sandy Bridge (2011) = [(100)*3.5]*(4+4/3)
I7 3770K Ivy Bridge (2012) = [(105)]*3.5]*(4+4/3)
I7 4790K Haswell (2014) = [(110)*4.0]*(4+4/3)
This would lead you believe that a Core2Quad running at 2.93 GHz is the same as an Sandy Bridge I3 at 3.0 GHz
Because [(65)*2.93]*(4) = [(100)*3.0*]*(2*2/3) or almost equal. But then you forget that the I3 has 2 real cores and consumes half the power that the Q6800 takes. That is because the architecture is much more advanced. There is much more behind the hood of a CPU than number of cores and GHz.
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TL;DR version:
For practical reasons, the top overclock maximum for daily usage caps out at around 4.5/5.0 GHz.