In truth, it never pushes to hit a limit, it OCs to something that could be regarded as ok, good but not perfect, (it ussually misses the cap by at least 200mhz, meaning you can manually push it that much more, on a 1060, numbers are smaller on stronger cards.), and then measures the difference from power/temp limit. As long as this margin gets smaller, it adjusts the clocks downwards, so as not to hit a wall at some point, resulting in major fps drop. So you can think of them as 2 seperate systems, 1 is pre-programmed to kick in as soon as you start your application, and OC the card as much as it can, then a 2nd system kicks in, and tries to actively control clocks to reduce the chance of you hitting the temp limit to 0, under normal circumstances.