How NVIDIA made the 9600 GT gain extra performance .. secretly
What a coincidence it is that some NVIDIA chipsets offer a feature called "LinkBoost" that automagically increases the PCI-Express clocks. This feature was pioneered with the NVIDIA 590i chipset and is present in the NVIDIA 680i chipset too, but has recently been disabled as far as I know. Also some motherboards from ASUS and other companies increase the PCI-Express bus frequency beyond 100 MHz when the BIOS option is set to "auto".
The automatic increase of 25 MHz on the PCI-Express bus frequency yields an increase of 25% or 162.5 MHz over the stock clock (assuming a 650 MHz clock board design). With a final clock of 812.5 MHz you can bet this card will perform much better, when used by an unsuspecting user, on an NVIDIA chipset motherboard with LinkBoost.
Also it will have an extra performance advantage when reviewers compare the non-overclocked GeForce 9600 GT against any other card which is commonly done in most reviews. Unfortunately such a massive overclock can often cause instability of the graphics card, maybe so much that the system won't POST at all.
The execution of this from NVIDIA's side is less than poor in my opinion. They did not communicate this new feature to reviewers at all, nor invented a marketing name for it and branded it as a feature that their competitors do not have.
Even when asked directly we got a bogus reply: "the crystal frequency is...". No, there is no 25 MHz crystal and its frequency is not fixed either. I'm not accusing the sender of the E-Mail of course, I just believe he didn't know, maybe this fact wasn't communicated to the marketing team at all. However, if you would get such an inquiry wouldn't you look into this further if it was your job to properly promote a product?
More room for speculation can be found in the driver. Why does it always return the "normal" frequency and not the real one? Maybe the driver developers didn't know about this either, who knows. I find it hard to believe that the internal communication lacks that much in a company which constantly delivers excellent, high-performing products.
It is certainly nice for NVIDIA to see their GeForce 9600 GT reviewed on NVIDIA chipsets with LinkBoost enabled where their card leaves the competition behind in the dust (even more). Also it could send a message to customers that the card performs considerably better when used on an NVIDIA chipset? Actually this is not the case, the PCI-Express frequency can be adjusted on most motherboards, you will see these gains independent of Intel/AMD CPU architecture or Intel/NVIDIA/AMD/VIA chipset.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/Shady_9600_GT/
...pelo menos já não publicita na caixa...
