As earlier reports have revealed, NVIDIA has told its partners that they can not sell overclocked cards. The reason is simple, it doesn’t want any problems with stability or cards damaged by the overclocking, something which results in high RMA costs and bad PR. This was something NVIDIA experienced with the G71 architecture where several manufacturer launched generously overclocked cards which then resulted in problems and caused a whole a lot of discussions. Several manufacturers are still propagating for selling overclocked models of GeForce 8800GTX/GTS to stand out from the crowd.
NVIDIA seems to be fighting this though and so far it is sticking to its “no overclocking” policy but it seems that NVIDIA might become more generous in the future. The question is just when this will happen and according to The Inquirer this will be in January, 2007.
“The second, more realistic date, would be January 2007. This would allow Nvidia to give manufacturers a chance to make a faster clocked card and the market is here to embrace it.”
