NVIDIA's shady trick to boost the GeForce 9600GT

[Luka_Aveiro]

And leads to people like me being up to midnight on a work night bashing their heads into the keyboard thinking they got horribly binned cards cause they didnt know this little hook.

You are right about that. I would be pissed of as well if that happened to me, but I guess I would try a "load default values" at bios and then test it, is I have already done to some cards, but I would never figure out that internal clock was PCI-Express frequency related, and it was holding me back

I'm confused here. Does this mean that the 9600GT has been having an unfair advantage over 8800GT in terms of core clocks?

If PCI Express frequency is above 100mhz, probably YES.