Here's what he wrote to me about killing the 6800GT when I emailed him.
I installed the Koolance block on the core, which meant removing the stock heatsink/fan. I had some ramsinks, but the stock ramsinks were bigger and had a heatpipe, so opted to leave them in place. Since I had installed the waterblock, I no longer had the ducted fan blowing on the ramsinks, but I have good case airflow and figured passive cooling for the ram would be good enough. (mistake number one)
In my experience, ramsinks have been nothing more than window-dressing anyway. Sure they look nice, but they really don't have much heat to deal with, and in the past I have had equal or better overclocking results on most cards with no ramsinks at all as opposed to running them with them on.
To keep it short, I used the nvidia "determine optimal clockrates" utility to initially overclock the card. (mistake number two) It set a rate of 485/1185, and one run of AquaMark later, the card was history. It started artifacting about halfway through the bench, I immediately killed AM and reset the clockrates to default, but the damage was already done. It really can happen that fast: less than 30 seconds elapsed between the appearance of the artifacts and my successfully resetting the clockrates."
Take it for what you will but this guy has been water cooled since 97 and overclocking so I'm defnitely going to take his advice and put a case fan over those ramsinks when I put on my silverprop. I definitely won't be putting that 3 pound dangerden monster on a video card though. Even if it does WC the ram.
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