Folding Forum

As I wrote up in my thread about my issues with my RTX 2080Ti Founders Edition, RTX cards use a technology called Boost 4.0 which automatically boosts their clocks until they reach either a thermal limit or a power limit.

Does this mean that the answer to "is your GPU overclocked" is, by default, "yes" if you have an RTX card? This may have also been true for older series cards as much of what is better in Boost 4.0 vs Boost 3.0 (and earlier) is the ability to control the boost curves as a user.

Updated the text and changed the title to be more in the form of a question as the answers seem to indicate that the answer is "No"...

Overclocking in general means to increase the clock but stay with the same voltage. That leads to instability as higher clock need higher voltage to be stable. The vendor garantees that boost clocks get enough voltage to be stable. But if user increases boost clock additionally and voltage stays the same then this is overclocking and leads to instability.

By default GPUs are not overclocked. But there are rare cases where a GPU is still not stable for compute even when original manufacturer boost clocks and voltages are used. In this case manually increasing voltage or decreasing boost clock can help to stabilize a GPU for compute.

The point of boost algorithms is to reach tdp max more often. It also works in reverse when under low load, it down clocks to save power.
This boost in and of itself should not cause WU issues. Other factors can come into play like the CPU and RAM. The new core22 WU demand quite a bit of CPU power with Nvidia cards and this can reveal problems with those components.
In addition, all silicon degrades with use over time, more so with higher voltages and watts. Nvidia and Intel settle on safe voltages and clock rates that should last at least till the end of warranty, but its never a guarantee.