My 2070 XC that I recently bought is reporting memory clock at 1750 MHz in GPU-Z (or 14 GHz effective clock), but it actually never goes above 1700 MHz (or 13.6 GHz effective clock), not in games, not when testing with EVGA Precision X1 - does anyone know what could be the reason?

Like what kind of applications, can you give me an example? I have never had any application limiting the frequency of video memory, so wouldn't know where to even start looking.

Another thing which will cause lower memory clock speed is if the NVIDIA driver detects that a GPU compute application is running. For example, crypto currency mining causes the memory clock to operate at a lower speed. If you have FoldingAtHome, SetiAtHome, a crypto mining application, or anything like that set up to operate whenever the system is idle, you might notice lower memory clocks.