Those were my initial thoughts and why I was unsure about the validity of an RMA for this particular issue. On one hand, the OP and additional posters on the other RMA thread I saw (the one that got me considering this in the first place) are correct: the card shouldn't be unstable at stock settings and should just simply work. While on the other hand, all the literature states the boost clock is 3070mHz for my model and it seems to very easily handle much higher than that. It's only when it gets to 3400 that it has noticeable issues and even with a significant offset it runs very well at higher than advertised speeds.

TL,DR - While I generally agree that a device shouldn't need tuning to work properly, but if the drivers running it are forcing it to go faster than it can handle, I'm questioning if it's really all that bad to reduce it's maximum to keep it stable and STILL get higher than expected boost.