9700 Pro after shim removal - hmm!?

[Admiral]

Went on and removed the shim from my 9700 Pro. Not the easiest of jobs since the thinnest blade I could find was on a small kitchen knife
Blade was good though a bit elastic. I managed to slide it under the shim and cut through three of the glue layers on the fourth not being able to maneuver the knife’s handle between two ramsinks or over the core so I gently popped off the shim at this last step.
Hercules seems to have chosen a silver compound to cool this puppy and since some of it got on the GPU bed over a few contacts when I removed the heatsink I decided to get rid of it all (don’t have the fondest memories with silver paste) before I removed the shim and put some regular white silicone paste instead.

Now I can clock the core at 390 from 360 before, though the strangest thing has happened to the memory. At the slightest overclock the cursor begins to show some corruption and text seems to be missing a few pixels or having some misaligned.
Funny thing is it only happens in 2D
After putting the card back in, XP detected and installed some new hardware, didn’t show what and I haven’t installed any new hardware, just took the video card out removed the shim and put it back.
Uninstalled the drivers, control panel and rad clocker an installed them again with no luck.

The small copper ramsinks don’t use the stiffest glue, they would budge a bit when gently twisting them. I was afraid I made one or two ramsinks slide off a bit though at a close inspection everything seems to be making contact.
To be honest, don’t really know what happened

[rylan]

So you have your heatsink sitting directly on the core heatslug instead of the gpu heat spreader? Might be putting too much pressure on the core if thats what you did. I've seen strange problems from uneven pressure or too much pressure on CPUs when people popped the cap off and cooled the core directy. Its really hard to tell if its uneven also.

btw silicone paste isn't as good as the silver stuff (thought you would want to use the non-conductive silver paste).

[Admiral]

I can play with the core clock how much I want with nothing happening. I have absolutely no issues at 390 core clock, 310 memory clock.
Though if I try to go over 310 memory it gets corrupted in 2D, evan if I leave the core at 325 and only go for the memory.
The memory was doing 360 fine before.

[dZeus]

are you sure you didn't accidentaly popped of any SMD resistors on the core? I think some are used for card detection (they had some kind of SMD resistor mod to change 9500s into 9700s before they did that through software).

Compare your resistors on the core with a photo of a Radeon 9700 Pro core closeup:
I know I almost popped off mine when I removed the shim.

[Admiral]

The resistors seem to be in place.
However, looking on the back of the card, near one of the mounting clips, I seem to have slightly damaged some of the traces on the PCB that come from one memory chip.