XFX Life time warrenty for my 9800 gtx?

So I had this card back in 2008, It was a nice card but I screwed it up. I was constantly getting the bsod because of my crappy power supply I had. It was getting old and was not providing sufficient power to the 9800 gtx. I was planing to get a better one sometime that week but I had some work to do on the computer at that time. So I took pull out the 9800 gtx from PCIe slot but I left the 6pins connected with the card hanging in the case. I was using integrated graphics which stopped the bsod and allowed me to finish my work. Little did I know not removing the power source from the card was a pretty stupid thing to do. At one point I left my house for quite some time. When I got back I used the computer for a hour or two and I smelled something burning in my computer. At first thought it's probably the power supply considering that it was the almost dead to began with. However it turns out to be the most valuable part in my computer, the 9800gtx. I immediately shut down the computer and took out the 9800gtx and it was burning hot. I let it cool down a bit and connected back to the computer to check it it still works. It works! I mean it would boot to windows but it was extremely slow and freezes right after. To be honest I'm just happy I didn't burn the house down. Now I'm wonder if I could still RMA this card even though I was not using the product as indented but who's going to know lol. I took the card apart and couldn't find anything wrong with the pcb or burned marks. Now the question is what will xfx do? I've heard recently their warranty service is garbage and if I'm lucky I'll get a ATI card on par with the 9800gtx. So any comments? LOL  

P.S. Building my first rig during the summer with gtx 570 and 2600k with 8gb of ram so I'm trying to be optimistic about the incident.