Pulled out my fully-functioning GeForce GTX 480 by Galaxy off the shelf. Decided "Hell, I'll try delidding and replacing the TIM!"

Delid was completely successful, not even a scratch on anything except that glue-down cement.

Decided to carefully scrape the glue-down cement off. It's so hard I have to use a 3" pocket knife to do it.

Got over-zealous and caught the tiny metal ends of two or three of the tiny capacitors. SHIT SHIT SHIT!

Put my Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut on the GPU die and glued down the IHS anyway...

Slapped it into a Dell Vostro 220, installed the drivers....and it's still working.

Went to try a benchmark...but apparently all of them are in the 2GB+ category. Holy shit! I'm not waiting hours for that shit to download.

But it's working. No artifacts, no flashes, no lines. But the capacitors, from what I understand, are to smooth out power delivery. Anyone here think I can still play games on it as long as I don't overclock or will that just kill the GPU? I have no idea if it's even possible to replace those tiny-ass capacitors. They're, like, 1 mm wide. Oh, they're still THERE... Just the tiny metal end-cap came off. The other side is still intact and the capacitor is still glued down or whatever. It's weird. Most of the time, you hear about someone slicing them completely off with a razorblade. That's not what happened to me.

Am I right to be worried? Even though the card is sitting in a box on the side. With the Windows XP desktop up and everything sitting idle, the GPU was sitting at 50C. That could very well be because I hadn't replaced the existing TIM on the heatsink yet, only the one underneath the IHS. My EVENTUAL plan was to install water-cooling blocks from EK onto them, hence my reluctance to waste a bunch of extra TIM. I have Arctic Silver 5 for that application - Kryonaut is too damned expensive for anything except the delid!