'NVIDIA's shady trick to boost the GeForce 9600GT'

Interesting read from techPowerUp!:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews [...] _GT/1.html

nVidia using the PCie clock to boost performance? The only shady part about it is not letting anyone know.

Interesting read.

I'm not so concerned about how it was done, but the reporting of the 'normal clocks' instead of actual clocks is a little questionable, and their lack of replies to the W1zz is a concern, especially after ther terse initial brush off.

Interesting indeed. Possibly a sneaky move on Nvidia's part, but as they say, all's fair in love and graphics processing units

Yeah I saw that, but go one more page for the dark meat of the Link Boost tech, which gives you an idea how a card may perform differently from MoBo to MoBo and test/test & review/review;



That to me says, while the PR didn't know, it's obvious the engineers should be aware of this kinda thing.

Now you'd need to kinda discount any nVidia mobo tested until you found out if Link Boost was active (even if unbenownst to the reviewer at the time, not 'enabled').
So it could still report 650 mhz and really be at 800+ for all we know.

It's more annoying than truly nefarious or anything, I hate having to look at the AA used because of the discrepencies, this is just another thing to take into consideration to think of when gathering info.

nVidia's on the juice, send them to Capital Hill with Clemens and Bonds. I like better performance as much as the next guy, but this is a bit low for business practices to not inform the consumer of the reason for the disproportionately high performance for its SP/TMU/ROP count and clock.

Yeah I don't know, could be especially since it needs an nV board to work to begin with.

The place of concern would be people seeing a 'default' clock of 650 (but on a 115+ PCIe bus) , then comparing it to something like a GF8800GT at stock speed, and then thinking you have overclocking room ontop of that performance based on people's OC's on 100mhz, where in reality it's getting close max OC already.

Anywhoo, it's an interesting technology, although kinda like Overdrive for dummies (what we don't tell them they won't worry about), but for most overclockers they'd want more knowledge and control, since they may want to OC indpendantly and tweak the voltages while they're at it.

One thing that didn't get answered yet is what does it OC, just the core minus the shaders or the core and the shaders together in tandem ratios?

Dude, I know!!! I was just thinking that it is like the video card version of AOL. I wonder if it is going to be specific to the 9600 series since they figure it is a low end card that isn't of interest to the OC crowd or if we will see this even in the 9800 series.

No, I would not call many things that Nvidia does "love". It's more like the old fashioned "breach of promise". From blurry 7xxx series image quality, to fudged drivers for Crysis that give more fps but do not show the game the way the developers meant, to this little bit of chicanery.

Nvidia, the way the gaming customer is meant to be fooled.

If it makes the 9600gt out to be a better card on an Nvidia board, then they can use the marketing to contrast Nvidia "performance" vs. ATI's alleged second place status at that price point. The problem is that Nvidia's not being transparent about their behind the scenes overclocking of the PCIe bus, so people buying the cards for non-Nvidia boards might think their card performs better than ATI under stock conditions.

I find it interesting that the marketing and driver department are in the dark. While it could be marketed as a feature that recommends Nvidia boards, it comes across as just another behind the scenes Nvidia exploit that they don't want to be made public by their own team.

Intel should have bought Nvidia instead of developing their own GPU's, because the companies both operate with a questionable business ethic, even in generations where they have very competitive products.

I like Nvidia but this is all very sheisty. I'm an overclocker and I don't want my clock rates or voltages changing in my system without me knowing about it. If it makes my system unstable I'll be pissed.

BTW, thanks for posting that badgtx. I would have missed that article this week.

They didn't lie, just didn't tell the complete truth