As
@zophiel said go through the discussion to see that Gigabyte cooler was an afterthought from other who had issues. Same issues you have with very high temps and very low clocks.
On reference card (with reference cooler), could get easily 1500+ core without much fuss or high temps. Ran an extensive big post with dozens of tests and different settings.
Observing max & avg speeds, temps, noise and performance.
If remember correctly only on power save mode could get sub 1450mhz, but at those speeds the card was running very cool at 35C with the reference heatsink.
(I have both Nitro & reference).
Update found the first of my posts with reference
https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/posts/32219331/
as you see on just balanced mode the reference was running 1550Mhz without any other change.