Whew, it was a pita, but I think I have it solved.
Some background: when I took the original heatsink off for the first time to dry fit my block, I used a pair of sissors to pry on it. Bad choice. I cut across a couple traces, although luckly /most/ of them weren't too bad. One of the "fingers" that reach into the agp slot was totally severed, however. Luckily I folded it back itno place, and things seemed to be working fine...
Tonight, I decide to lower my temps a bit, so i took my watercooling block off, and lapped it some. Got about 90% of it niiice and smooth, and decided that was good enough (a few of the low spots were /very/ low, I figured it was unimportant because they were around the edge). Put everything back together, and tried to boot.
No go. Apparently my shinanigans with the sissors had finally caught up with me. I showed my dad what was up with it, and he /rubbed it/. That totally f**ked me over. The little piece of metal was gone! I had a significant gap between the new end of the finger and where the trace started. GRR. In frustration (I figured I had a dead card anyways) I followed this pages advice and removed the heatspreader:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...modding_5.html
It came right off according to their instructions. Not hard at all!
After taking some pent up aggression out on the heatspreader, I got my soldering iron out and just soldered it back together. It looks like ass, and it probably doesn't have as good a connection, but oh well. It started working again
Plus, the temps are much much better. I know a lot of people in this forums poohpooh rambling off temps, but here we go:
Before I started screwing with it: No idea. Didn't know there was a screen in the driver window to check it
After I removed the stock heatsink and replaced pink cement with AS: 110C
After I lapped about 20% surface air, on stock heatsink: 100C
After I put on watercooling: 73C
After I lost it on the heatspreader: 36C
In theory the further lapping that went to waste would have probably got me near the 36ish mark. Only down side is that this modification brings my cpu temperature up because the VC is finally dumping some heat into the water
Thanks for the help guys.