Link boost has been around for quite some time.... ATi has a form of it in their RD600 as well. All it does is overclock the PCI-E bus automatically when it senses the card brand of it's choice. All this is is merely NVidia finally making a board that can take advantage of the pci-e bus clocking feature that's been around for almost 2 years now.

So, if this is true and not shens, does that mean the reviews where they overclock the cards and still hit 800mhz+ actually closer to 1000mhz? After all, just 850 * 25% would be 1062 mhz.

Calling this shady, I don't know about that one. It boosts the cards performance for the end user without worry of voiding warranty or requiring any work at all. That's not shady, that's called increasing performance. Nothing wrong with that at all.