Warning to those thinking of changing thermal paste on Leadtek 6800s.

I just had scare here. I took off the heatsink and decided to put on some AS5 for the core and AS ceramique for the memory. A very thin layer was put on for everything. Afterwards I booted up and my idle has risen to 65 C, and full looad on rthdribl is 100C

I quickly shut the comp off and checked over the videocard. It turns out the core and some memory chips, particular the 2 right above the core is barely touching the heatsink with just a thin layer of thermal paste. A thicker layer of AS5 was put on and now my temps dropped to 51 idle, 68 load. Just waiting for AS5 to cure now.

Yep,good contact with the core is very often overlooked.To me its like do or die.
Wouldnt it be great if there was a standard way of securing the coolers on video cards just like with cpu's?That way,they would be on right 100% of the time.

Yep, my advice is don't worry about AS5 with the stock heatsink. If you're going to add a waterblock then it's a must but otherwise just leave it alone. These cards are too expensive to be messing with anyways

Yeah, when I put a tiny layer of as5 on my 5900, it raised my temps to like 70 celsius then crashed on every game. I then proceeded to put gobs of as5 on, seems like it helped me get a few more mhz than the standard white goop (which was getting crusty anyway). I used a lot of as5, who knows, maybe 1/4 or 1/2 of 3.5g.....