When NVIDIA and its partners first unvieled the GeForce 8800 GTX cards to the world, there was one thing that all the various models had in common: everything. The previous GPU generation that consisted of the 7800/7900/7600/etc models were also mostly the same, but board vendors had some wiggle room with the clock speeds on their particular boards. Selling overclocked graphics cards allowed each company to attempt to differentiate themselves from the competition. But then the 7900 GTX fiasco occurred and all hell broke loose. Many of the first rounds of 7900 GTX cards that were overclocked beyond NVIDIA's reference specifications were locking and freezing on the consumers. The problem affected nearly all of the board vendors and in the end the result was that NVIDIA didn't provide the right information on how far these chips could be pushed safely.



Link: PC Perspective