Early in my career, before "turbo" or "boost" frequencies were a thing in commodity CPU products, I heard a similar tale about boosting the speed of the signal processors in a defensive radar system.

The thought was that you would rather overheat and perform the calculation than protect the circuit and lose the ship. It's kind of a hail mary strategy. It definitely gave me a visceral feeling for how one should be ready to re-frame their systems analyses, even if apocryphal.