cowie, i turned off software OCP and ran furmark and was able to make the card pull 100 more watts than with OCP enabled, my card did not die. i have two Gigabyte GTX 570 which has the same reference design as ASUS and i am guessing EVGA cards. I think nvidia skimped heavily on the VRM with the GTX 570. The GTX 580 has 6 phases the GTX 570 has 4 phases for GPU both cards have 2 extra phases for the memory. 33% reduction in ouput from the phases on a card with 5-10% less TDP is skimping in my book. My card isn't dead though, I am thinking about doing some of those mods, at least the voltage read point and new BIOS.