Improving cooling of Asus G2S-A1?

I know a few G2S owners out there who can get 600/850 stable. And I know a few G1S owners who can easily do 575 or 550/800 or 850.

I can barely get 500/anything, and even that artifacts in many games. I can run stock 475/700, and that's about it.

I've tried elevating it, and that isn't working
I've tried letting some cold winter air in here and it isn't working
I doubt a laptop cooler will work much better, I think it's a problem with the inherent G2S ventilation - if it's elevated in a room that's sub-10C and still hitting 96 then a laptop cooler is not going to do anything.
I've seen that G1S with holes drilled in it and while I don't think I can go to such extremes (it would probably void my warranty), what can I do to help the ventilation?

I guess it might be a shoddy GPU, but I don't see how I could fix that (short of tossing my G2S in a tub of coke and claiming the accidental warranty )

 

GPUs are only made for stock clockspeeds. Anything above will be variable and your GPU may be weaker than others.

 

True, but saying a GPU is made only to run stock clocks isn't really helpful. Of course a GPU is made to run stock, but most have some semblance of OC ability. I'm not asking to run 650/950 or something ridiculous.

Never mind the G2S with it's better cooling, how many G1S can only run stock?

I'm being outperformed by Vostros, which is pretty sad because the only reason I bought the Asus was because of the DDR3 card running better clocks.

 

Let me rephrase.

When nVidia builds cards, they make them as good as possible. However, due to inevitable flaws in the materials, only some of them get to be the best cards. For example, if they made a batch of 100 cards, and 50 turned out to be good, those 50 may be designated as 8600m GTs. The other 50 can't run stably at stock speeds, so they artificially limit them, and brand them 8600m GS's. Some people end up getting the really good 8600m GTs. You may have gotten one that just escaped from being branded as an 8600m GS.

Quality of cards are variable, even with the same name. That's why I said that cards are only made to go stock speeds.

 

Potential overclock-ability in GPUs is just like CPUs.... some do better than others. As noted above, the degree to which one can ramp it up depends on the silicon, and some cards just aren't in the top quartile of the batch.

Stock speeds mean just that, it's the minimum level that the manufacturer *guarantees* the product to be fully functional. Any ability above that minimum is a bonus, and many products have available overhead that can be exploited (a consequence of the manufacturing process and manufacturer's need to effectively sell in the lower performance segments by locking down higher performing product), but that available overhead varies by product lot and production run.

Improved cooling doesn't sound like it's your issue, your "problem" is in the GPU chip itself - you probably have a card that posted near the minimum speeds during QA batch testing, and that's all you're going to get - all manufacturers work along those lines, it's the way it is .