NVIDIA's shady trick to boost the GeForce 9600GT

[Tuvok-LuR-]

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.

the performance increase has nothing to do with linkboost itself, with wider bandwidth or higher pci frequency, it's just a gpu overclock

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.

actually, there's no problem in bringing to the average Joe an auto-overclocking and dummyproof performance increase
what makes it a cheat and a **** is:
- it's not documented/advertised by nvidia
- the driver reports the non-overclocked frequency
so basically looks like nvidia wants to hide this and make people think their cards at stock frequencies are faster then they actually are.