Except that isn't how it works on modern cards anymore. They have power limits in place to make sure they don't go over their power target. The power limit on the GTX950 with no power connector was 75w. You can up the clocks all you want, but GPU Boost will make them drop back down to keep within the 75w power limit. That is why tests like furmark don't give stupid high power numbers anymore. So overclocking without raising the power limit would still give ~75w.
In that review average power was 74W. After overclocking the GPU at over 1400Mhz and memory at over 2000MHz, the results where close to 20% extra performance. I think I am going to doubt that someone gets a 20% extra performance and stays under the 75W limit. Probably the card goes to 90W(20% extra power for 20% extra performance), if not more considering that usually power consumption goes faster up, compared to performance. If they where getting 1-3% extra performance, I would have agreed with you.
Interesting analogy, but somewhat fitting. In fact, there are MLC SSDs that perform crazy good, almost at SLC levels until you have them filled up a certain amount, then the performance starts to drop off. The reason being that they run all the MLC flash in SLC mode until the extra space is needed, then it switches to MLC mode. But the benchmarks in the review sure look good.
Are those SSDs advertised as SLC SSDs? I believe not. Well, if they where Nvidia products, probably they would. And people would be happy to convince themselves that while being MLC, performing as SLC would made them equal to SLCs. And anyone saying the opposite, would have been a stupid fanboy that hates Nvidia and doesn't acknowledge Nvidia's superior engineering. "It is a good design".
Also SLC vs MLC is not just performance difference. If I am not mistaken SLCs are considered as having better longevity. The same applies to the 970. It is not just those slow 500 MBs. Also less cache, less ROPs, less memory bandwidth. Specs where completely wrong and we shouldn't be giving any excuses to companies.
Just seen the whole video and now I'm even happier that I haven't bought an AMD card since 2008. Signifcant driver and performance glitches are one thing (and bad enough) but potentially killing the mobo with excess current is a new low. There's no way they couldn't have known about this at the design and testing phase. No, they tried to palm off a substandard product and hoped they wouldn't get cought out. It amounts to a kind of fraud FFS.
IMO these cards should be pulled from the market until the fix has been applied and tested to be effective.
The way this company is going I'm unlikely to ever buy one of their graphics cards again. No wonder NVIDIA can charge what they like for their cards. At least they work beautifully most of the time.
Google Bumpgate + Nvidia. That's a low that AMD probably will never reach. Also I bet you haven't downloaded a single Nvidia driver the last 12 months, considering that you still talk about drivers. Well I think McCoy's words about this argument would have been "It's dead Jim".
As I have been saying... If AMD had been smart and made the card overdraw from the 6-pin PCI-E and NOT the MB slot, no problem at all, let it sip current.
I guess they thought that there are just too many "600W PSUs" costing $20 out there.
What AMD should have done was to lock the GPU at a specific frequency and say "Sorry guys, you will have to buy a custom if you want overclocking". Or they could just offer only a 4GB reference version at $199 and let AIBs made the 8GB cards. 4GB less GDDR5 on board could also help in lowering power consumption.
