GTX 590 reviews

[Sherman Tank]

Why must there be an inherent weakness? Under volting has been done with literally EVERY dual GPU card.

Because Nvidia took very bold steps to greatly reduce the overclockability of the 590 after reports of premature deaths. The only reason Nvidia would do this, is if there was actually a serious issue with the card.

As for the OCP being implemented, AMD does the same thing or do you not remember a certain HD 6970 downclocking in Metro 2033 (and likely other scenarios) at reference clocks? So I am guessing there is some weakness there too? Personally, I don't think so in either case.

Can you not adjust powertune to +20 to avoid this? Also, if PT wasn't there, do you really think 6970's would be blowing up?

What I think is that the OCP is in place to control power consumption not due to PSU insufficiency but rather to avoid drawing too much power through the PCI-E slot.

Wrong, it was first introduced for Fermi to simply keep cards in spec and avoid negative press reg. power consumption, especially in Furmark.

It obviously came in very handy to stop 590's from blowing up also.

I mean sure, the components on any given GPU can implode if pushed too hard but that doesn't mean they were under designed.
overclocking, over voltage, etc.

IMO, the card is under designed if it blows up at stock or with mild overclocks, also note it's not actually the GPU's themselves that are blowing up.
The fact the card has now been artificially made unclockable just adds to the disappointment and frustration that Nvidia didn't build this cards with high enough quality components to allow some headroom (which we have now all come to expect), I think we all know that if Nvidia hadn't done this, the 590 could have actually been the 'fastest card in the world'.

It just means they are being pushed far beyond their reference spec by overclocking, over voltage, etc.

IMO, Nvidia are already pushing their card much further than what the reference spec 'should be', it's like they'v left ZERO safety margin, which is never a good idea, and the only reason I can think of why they'd done this, was because the 6990 caught them off guard.