in all seriousness though ive been able to push 4 titans on one board up to 250-270 range and keep it stable,
it took a lot of firmware hacking and liquid cooling, but it's totally possible!
Even when I was GPU mining, I found that undervolting and running a bit slower/cooler was always a better option than hitting everything on head as hard as I could. I'm not surprised that the Titans also run better this way.
When I first got my Titan, it was totally unstable, but I wound up running it a little slower and it was better that way. I should have taken the hint. With everything that's transpired since then, it makes perfect sense.
Yeah, it makes complete sense that stuff works much more reliably when they are ran within spec. Running them reliably out of spec is always a gamble. Unfortunately, most mining hardware is made like shit. You get lucky when you can run shit hardware out of spec and reliably =) The even further problem is when manufacturers market them at a default speed which is beyond spec and miners think thats within spec. So, you have all this highly unreliable junk .... just to keep miners in competition with each other and further fuel the greed.
The end result: Mining hardware manufactures are the only ones who really make the money in this game.
but, as far as running out of spec .... as long as you keep things cool enough, 90% of the time you can get away with it just fine.