LOD tweak is similar but different than mipmap and is allowed.

Whats wrong with tweaking? Its a part of overclocking dude ;)

^^^^i know....its this rules of HWBOT....they leave me scratching my head sometimes....

mipmap IIRC reduce the image to frame renderings. Not allowed.

TBH I do not like allowing LOD tweaks either but...no choice.

LOD has nowhere near as much affect as mipmaps.
I mean, say you increase LOD to +15, the image looks terrible, and you'd think your score would double as surely the gpu is hardly having to do anything
But I've found LOD only has a fairly small affect, not dissimilar to other tweaks for other benchmarks etc

and another thing is that, with LOD, you need to keep testing for the right value, which adds to its geek value, :p. With mipmap its just one time change with huge gains.

Hehe, he said "geek value"