NVIDIA secretly overclocks GeForce 9600GT?

Many were astounded by how well GeForce 9600GT performed in the first reviews. Even though the number of shader processors were reduced to 64, it was breathing down the neck of the much better equipped 8800GT. Many reviews have used factory-overclocked cards, simply because many partners decided to launch overclocked cards, instead of going with NVIDIA’s reference of 650MHz. However there have been some oddities, and in some cases, GeForce 9600GT has performed extremely well, even at the reference frequency.