Fried 6800GT & AS5

[Furutsun]

I have a rather well used Gainward 6800GT Golden Sample, one of the one's that came with those big red rectagular dual fan assemblies, if anyone can remember some way back.
http://img.hexus.net/v2/graphics_car...0GT/FrontB.jpg

It came OC'd to 450Mhz core and 1.1Ghz Ram if my memory serves me well. However after sometime using it one of the fans started making a unpleasant grinding noise, the gainward cooler was loud as hell anyway so I changed it for a Arctic Cooling Silencer NV5 and used Arctic Silver 5. Was inaudible and temps were way lower than the loud gainward cooler.
Well fast forward a year, I fitted a new cooler, Zalman VF900 -Cu Cooler, again with the AS5 Paste, I was rather messy with the paste and got in on the capacitors the surround GPU die. Then some months after that I started getting a corrupt display at random points during gameplay, followed shortly by full system lockups, that gradually got more frequent even after I clocked the card down to reference speeds, couldn't even Ctrl+Alt+Del.

So now my question. I know AS5 is slighly capacitive, what do you think is the posibily that the AS5 altered the values of the caps around the gpu die and fried the card? As I took off the cooler, cleaned it all up with Isoprop and I'm hoping I can ressurect it

[k@in]

Hmm, i have gotten slight ammounts of AS5 on the area around the die, but everything is working fine for me... i think that it is just a coincidence.

[balewolf]

well i put as5 on my 6800 to lol and its havin problems i got it around the die to but tried to clean it up good as i could. My problem is the gpu temp sensor is bad and only works half the time other time it picks random temps. When its over the 127c it thottles way back making games unplayable i done orded a pcie board and a evga 7900gs Ko to replace my setup.

[Furutsun]

I'm planning to use some AS ceramique to reset the cooler on it, and see if it works, or might be that the overclock just killed it over a long time.

Have you tried installing another version of the drivers for your card, might be that the driver was reading the gpu sensor wrong. Thats all i can think it could have been other than as u say, it's gone bad.

[balewolf]

Ya iv tried 100s of drivers lol the newer ones with broke temp monitoring work best the older ones that can monitor make it run slow. I upgraded my system to a 7900gs and a new mobo now the 6800 has made it into the spare parts box.

[Vaifan]

AS5 could very well kill your card, thermal conductivity = electrical conductivity (not really but this will suffice for now) with metalic paste. Any thermal conductive material should conduct electrons so... be careful when applying near PCB and/or other expensive hardware.

[Taichan]

Vaifan, not all thermal conductive is electrician conductive.

ASC isn't as far as i have read neither is AS5

[balewolf]

well as5 is mosty silver if i recall so it could conduct electric and cause a short. As5 might be better then the orginal as that came out not sure been a while sence i read somthing about it.