My poor 8800 GTX :(

So, I got my 8800GTX at the end of november. and it was/is an amazing card, very impressed!

In my eternal (and pointless) quest for more bungholio marks, I decided to "mod" it a bit.

I removed the HSF along with the stupid thick thermal pad things. I replaced it all with AS5. I placed small squares of credit card type material under the retaining screws to bring the HSF down onto the RAM chips.

I removed the plastic shroud from the HSF and attached a 90CFM 80mm fan to it.

Of course, I broke the damn thing at some point.

Windows showed graphical corruption about 10 mins into booting in safe mode, would bluescreen in normal mode before I could log in, with nice messages like "page fault in nonpaged area". Even the Win XP install process crashes every time.

This wouldnt be so annoying were it not for the fact that I gave my old 7900GT away like 3 days prior (I'm a sucker for a hot woman )

So anyway, my main computer is completely out of action for now, as I'm going to wait for 8900 and R600 before replacing it....

Not really sure why I have posted this, except to let you lot share in my pain

Wow, how did you do that?

I listened to some BAD advice at overclock.net that the HSF would contact the ram no problem, and now my RAM is high and dry!

Do you think that flexing from you tightening down the screws beyond specs may have caused your problems?

Since you can boot and get problem after some minutes, it sounds like cooling problem. And safe mode normally run core and ram in a lower frequency than normal mode so it can live longer.
try revert all your change to HSF or even restore the original cooler

Sorry to hear about your card...

On the other hand I hope you received some benefit from your largesse to the hot woman.