OK, in deed the higher (closer to borderline of stability) overclocks become more stable now... but I noticed at what price... that's all thanks to lower actual TDP under load so it doesn't exceed the Power Target too much (which might have been a problem initially in original BIOS). .... however it manages to keep the TDP at lower levels thanks to more aggressive power throttling on the core in extreme situations.
... so in summary, yes the overclock is stable (firmer now), but might bring slightly less performance because of deeper power throttling in order to get there...
e.g. here on my updated GTX 670 and OC'ed to +145core (1243 actual) & +525mem (3522 actual) I ran 3dmark11 (more stressful than Heaven3.0) with graphs from precision. just look how deeply it undercuts the core clock boost during the Test#1 in 3dm11.
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ImageShack.us check the graphs on right side of screen, 2nd from top is the actual TDP and the 3rd from top is the Core (should be constant under load). as you note my core OC was throttled down by nearly 150MHz, however it seems that it happened before the TDP spike occurred (GPU BIOS compensating in advance?), so the TDP max levels were fine at a cost of lowered performance.
on original BIOS it never power throttled by that much even at higher clocks, but the TDP was spiking well above 132% too (now no more than 127%).
another question. have anybody noticed that enabling Adaptive VSYNC in NVIDIA control panel yields higher benchmarking scores versus "3D app controlled (default)" or VSYNC OFF? totally weird ...