better paste for gainward card

Ive been looking into putting better thermal paste on my Gainward 7800GS+ GPU

However looking at the card it seems they have used a type of "pad" for cooling the ram (picture below)

Im wonderig if removing the heatsinc to get at the core will damage these pads (as they are obviously sticky) and render them useless to reuse , leaving a gap between the copper heatsink and the ram when i reset it.

now do i need to buy new pads as well as AS5? or is it that the core also has a pad so after romoving that to and applying AS5 to ram and core the heatsink will simply clamp up tighter?

thank you in advance for any suggestions ..

sorry it looks like it was drawn by a child lol............

Im very good with a soldering iron but i wont be actually doing it , i have a friend whos a whiz at these things , he's also providing the variable resistor to do the job , and a its well worth it with this card , im already running 600/1400 without a mod , thats some some jump from the stock 450/1250

I need a volt mod to get the memory higher , ive done all the research and know exactly what to solder to where , its been a pain tbh cos i have the revision 2 of this card and its only recently been discovered how to mod it.

Cheers

Darren