Which 970?

[n=1]

anandtech's words, not mine. I would have expected them to keep testing conditions similar so that results can be compared.

This is what Anandtech said:

This new curve places the fan load noise levels at less than the previous curve’s idle levels, and now makes this one of the quietest midrange enthusiast cards we have ever reviewed.

The key phrase being "[they] have ever reviewed". Did they review the Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte offerings of the 970? "Midrange enthusiast cards" could refer to anything without context. You're simply making assumptions here.

No temps are not relevant as long as they are under the thermal limits. No goal post shifting at all.

Well let's go back a bit shall we?

The only reason to go with EVGA this time round would be for the support. The physical hardware is inferior to the competition (Asus, MSI, Gigabyte) whether in terms of performance or cooling.

Except where it is shown to be superior in both performance and cooling... like the FTW.

Uh huh. Previously you trumpeted the FTW as having superior performance and cooling, and when I showed it does not have superior cooling relative to the competition, temps suddenly don't matter. That is goalpost shifting my friend.

Again, you can't compare single samples. You need a larger pool of samples to eliminate variability... the silicon lottery.

I updated my post, but let me just put it here instead since it would be more directly relevant:

Back to TDP. The EVGA 970 FTW, like the Asus Strix 970, has the same amount of deliverable power. FTW uses 2x6 pins, Strix uses 1x8 pin, for a total of 225W. Is it any coincidence then, that the Asus Strix 970 consistently failed to reach 1500 boost across all five different reviews?

There is a fundamental power delivery limitation on the FTW that simply cannot be overcome, much like the Asus Strix 970. And before you tell me n=5 is still too small of a sample size, yes I fully understand that, and I'm well aware of what the silicon lottery is. The point being while n=1 might be an outlier, n=5 starts to paint a reasonable trend, and that trend simply points towards that overclocking is likely going to be limited by how much power the card is able to obtain. Both the FTW and Asus Strix lag behind the curve at 225W compared to MSI and Gigabyte, both of which allow a maximum of 300W deliverable power (6+8 pins for both).

And my observation is entirely consistent with AnandTech's, who even directly states:

Despite not being temperature limited, what we can see right away is that regardless of the clock speed settings it uses, the GTX 970 FTW is TDP limited under all scenarios. At no point in time are we able to maintain the card’s top boost bin, and instead the card spends its time fluctuating between the boost bins it can hold while maintaining power consumption of 145W

The Asus Strix 970 allows for ~196W total power with 120% TDP limit on the factory BIOS. Even then it barely pushed past 1501 boost, but still throttled during benchmarks because it ran out of juice. Even the MSI card with 220W limit on factory BIOS still throttled. Just goes to show you simply cannot maintain a good overclock if you're power limited.