The boost speed advertised is the guaranteed minimum. Its not a maximum limit. Therefore most if not all Nvidia cards will boost higher due to cooling, power etc. Its been mentioned many times in this hallow forum. Its nothing new or surprising.
I know, I never said otherwise.
But its logical that these are set based on how fast the worst performance cards can perform, so if e.g. your worst 1 percentile of tested cards runs at say 1800mhz then you would set at maybe 1750mhz to not get RMA's. I dont think its very many cards that would be that bad, it would be the extreme end of it.
What I do think is wrong 100% tho is making assumptions that things like 2ghz is a easy overclock that every chip can do, and then saying if you cannot make 2.1ghz you must have a cooling problem or faulty card.
good luck trying to RMA a card on the basis you cannot overclock it to 2.1ghz without crashing.
TDP limits are spec'd to sustain the base clock speeds, the advertised turbo clock is guaranteed to be stable in the sense you wont get artifacts or crashes, anything above that is simply put "a bonus" and should never be expected.
However also remember even without any o/c done by the user, many cards will clock right up way above the advertised speeds all by themselves. So when someone says they cannot get much from overclocking it doesnt mean they leaving there card at e.g. 1800mhz because that was the advertised clock, the card may already be going up to 2ghz by itself. If a card is going up to 2ghz by itself and you can push it to say 2020mhz with an overlock, a mere 20mhz, you deem that a poor result? Would it be somehow made better if the card only went to 1800mhz by itself and then someone got the 2020 by a 220mhz overclock instead?
I never claimed my poor card is average, I know its below average so as such the average is better, but at least I am not claiming that no cards like mine exist, and I am some kind of oddity in the system.
In the case of my card tho I accept it is faulty as gigabyte OC mode is a stock feature for the card advertised, so I would be able to RMA it if I chose to. My EVGA card was also technically faulty as well.
Its a bit like those who claim every coffee lake can do 5ghz, heads stuck in the sand.
However most people will similarly also RMA a card if it cannot reasonably maintain Boost clock speed advertised, its just not guaranteed however like the Base clock number.
Yeah doesnt surprise me, but I think those should be rejected RMA's as turbo is a burst speed not sustained by design, it becomes sustainable when you jack up the power limit.
For me returning a component because you got a silicon loser is bad practice but of course we all know it goes on.
As far as your 5 samples go, you just got lucky. 5 samples and you say that every card (that isnt faulty) should be able to do the same thing? Even people with review samples have cards that cannot do 2.1ghz under water. Yes they could configure the card to run at 2.1 but it crashed.
My own auros 1080ti was almost on par with a gamersnexus sample as he published a lot of data, he had a pretty poor chip as well.
). No what I was pointing out is there is some variation, even between similar models under water and mine come in under the 2.1 GHz mentioned (maby should have been more clear there when I said the around bit).
