NVIDIA's shady trick to boost the GeForce 9600GT

[Eastcoasthandle]

Also, does this "conspiracy theory" even make sense?

Why would nvidia want to show lower clocks? It does not make sense. There is no reason for it.

And raising the pci-e frequency has given me a performance boost on ALL my cards from the 7900GS up. But it does not change the core clock.

It makes perfect sense. You should never rely on your PCIe frequency as a de facto to OC your GPU as going to high (on some MBs) can effect stability (in particular your HDD). The PCIe frequency was never designed to OC the GPU.