So this could be a potentially mind boggling stupid question but I'm not sure anyways.
How do factory overclocks work?
That's not the question exactly though, I understand overclocking and I understand what a factory overclock is.
I get that the manufacturer does testing to find a stable overclock at acceptable temperatures then they are shipped at that clock speed.
So is the overclock just saved to the cards BIOS which would be unique for each card implementation?
Really I guess I'm asking how clock speeds are set during production generally, which I may have just answered for myself, maybe??
You have pretty much answered the question yourself. In the name of graphics cards, most heavily modified and overclocked cards such as those from EVGA and KFA2 are not reference based because every thermal influence is taken into mind and they are designed to be as thermally efficient as possible. As far as the actual overclocking itself, the chips as they are delivered from nVidia/AMD are pretty dumb, and can't really do much by themselves without a configuration stored in a BIOS much similar to that as you'd find on a motherboard. Graphics cards really are just computers that you install into your computer. That BIOS is what determines what speed to run the GPU at and the OEM simply modifies it to their liking for whatever clock they want to achieve on their cards.
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