NVIDIA vs AMD (ATI)

I am going to be arguing that NVIDIA cards when overclocked still beat overclocked AMD cards, and also that in many cases stock NVIDIA cards do score higher marks than overclocked AMD cards 'I"m not going to deny that AMD cards are more power-hungry than NVIDIA cards, but this higher power consumption has it"s pros. You see this allows the AMD cards to be very overclockable and that will boost the performance of the AMD cards over the performance of NVIDIA cards' I am going against this claim, NVIDIA cards when overclocked usually have better performance than overclocked (OC) AMD cards and in many benchmarks stock NVIDIA cards actually beat OC AMD cards. Here is a benchmark that shows the results of stock R9 290X & GTX 780 Ti and also shows OC R9 290X and GTX 780 Ti () NVIDIA vs AMD benchmark. GTX 780 Ti won against R9 290X As we can see an OC'ed NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti always beat the AMD R9 290X OC, and in some tests the stock 780 Ti even beat the R9 290X OC. This goes to show that OC'ing your GPU is not as vital as some believe. Now I will not deny that most NVIDIA cards do have a locked voltage, this is mainly a safety reason to stop people from burning out their GPU. Each GPU will have a slightly different locked voltage due to the manufacturer and if the card has been OC'ed by the factory. I do believe that the higher end GPUs like the Titan and the 780 Ti actually come unlocked right out of the box, but even if you have a lower GPU like a GTX 760 or a GTX 650 it is not difficult to unlock the voltage. To OC a GPU you will have to use a program like MSI Afterburner or EVGA Precision, in these utilities you can actually unlock the voltage (http://img156.imageshack.us...) of the GPU and overclock from there, but this isn't really necessary. NVIDIA give you a good leeway to OC your GPU, if you want to go higher all you need to do is unlock the voltage control in your GPU (keep in mind you have to use a utility to overclock a GPU. AMD OR NVIDIA, you cannot do it in the BIOS, yet...) And the average gamer/user will have no need to really OC their GPU. NVIDIA cards have a built in feature called GPU Boost (the 600 Series has GPU Boost and the 700 series has GPU Boost 2.0) GPU Boost will automatically overclock your GPU depending on temp, voltage and if you have set ant preferences i.e. Power limit etc... (you do not have to change any settings in GPU Boost 2.0 if you do not wanna if will do it all for you. Preferences are more for enthusiasts to tinker with and gain more control over their GPU) ' it"s no lie that lower temperature results in longer lifespan of the card, but that"s actually irrelevant, because all the high-end cards need replacement after 4 years' While this may be true, there are some users who buy a GPU and when they have no use for it they give it to a family or a friends. A NVIDIA GPU will stand a higher chance of living longer than a AMD GPU as they use less voltage. Also even if I changed GPU every couple of months, I would still like to know that my GPU still has alot of life left in it, also stuff that lasts longer tends to perform better than stuff that lasts a shorter time period. I will not deny any of the higher VRAM or multi-monitor stuff, all of that AMD do better I am really enjoying this debate. I look forward to your reply