Conclusion

The idea of implementing a mechanism that directly increases the GPU frequency (and performance) based on the PCI-Express base frequency is a great novelty. It has the potential to offer hassle-free performance improvements to a large number of less experienced users. Being able to adjust this frequency in most modern BIOSes is a big plus because it will be applied without any software installation requirement in Windows (or any other operating system - there is your Linux overclocking).

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.

While nothing is wrong with having a better product (and I do believe this is a feature that makes the product better), being transparent about such changes should be the proper way to do it in this industry.

I would also like to invite NVIDIA to send us a statement explaining the reasoning behind this and maybe reveal some additional technical details of this great idea.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Unwinder and Sampsa for their great input and discussions on this topic.

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