A couple of ati questions

I half killed my 9550se (direct3d won't enable, random starts bring a very bad screen full of kaliedoscope, infamous ATI ending. Now in software rendering, no direct3d.) as well as four black bubbles protruding from the chip

ANYTHING BUT A *KABOOM* NOISE


I just ordered the ati visiontek 2600 pro AGP. I have studied the numbers and reviews and clearly saw this is not a king of the hill with FPS, I am out for the numbers that match my last agp system and last upgrade for it. I also bought an accelero s1 revision2 to fit. I did receive an answer here that it fits, but...
Did anyone actually do the fitting, I am aware that arctic cooling says it works, but like the geforce, is there an oddity of customization I have to work with? Just trying to get a heads up.
And lastly, the whole thing to my door for not 100, not 90, but 80 something u.s. dollars . From my own past experience with evolving systems, this directx 10 card could only go up in price as near future would demand it (seems a classic trend of ahead of itself- AGP is everywhere on larger systems like mine, not even 3 years old yet)