I chipped the core on my 6800GT.

[babybunny]

So I took off the 6800GT HSF and looked at the core. For those who don't know what the core looks like, go here. Now, is it just me or is this core markedly different from past dull, black nVidia cores?

I looked at it and thought, "Oh man, this is a naked, fragile core with no IHS." When I installed my waterblock I realized that my tubes were placing a fair bit of torque on the waterblock due to the extremely close distance between my mobo waterblock and videa card waterblock, but I hoped everything would be ok.

Everything did not turn out ok. Turned on computer. CPU died. This has nothing to do with video card.

While I'm waiting for a replacement CPU I decided to take off the 6800GT waterblock and see if the core was still ok. I found that one of the corners was chipped. By this time I was going haywire and quickly installed the stock HSF. When I got my CPU, I plugged the vid card in, and well, the video card SOMETIMES turns on and when it does the gaming is nice and fast, but there are graphical glitches in games like Unreal and Far Cry.

Does anyone have any input on this fragile GPU core? I remember back in the day with the old Athlon naked cores that people (including me) used shims to protect from crushing the core with watercooling.