By the way, I am a technophile. The college I'm attending even has the word "technology" in its name.
Okay so I consider ATI's picture quality better than NVIDIA's, although it's close. I compared the two in the HD 48xx days. I have ran two NVIDIA cards with at least 20% overclocks and for years. However I once overclocked an ATI card, a HD 4870, by a small amount and it artifacted when playing intensive games even after I backed down, and a year later broke. I firmly believe that I fryed my card. The other thing is that the ATI cards I have tried have caused electronic interference with my onboard sound that I can hear through speakers or headphones. I have had one NVIDIA card, my GTX 570, do the same, but not nearly as bad.
If you're trying to decide between the two you should probably get a hold of -- or at least access to -- some new cards and do a new comparison rather than assuming that things will still be the same as they were in an older trial.
I've never over-clocked a graphics card, and also never had trouble playing games with good quality and never had a card "fried" or interfere with other components. Perhaps you could consider choosing a card based on it's ability to run the games you want to run at desired quality/performance levels without over-clocking rather than based upon it's ability to operate whilst over-clocked.