Video card thermal paste application

[Bop]

I got my BFG 6800 Ultra OC PCIe in the other day(lucky me) and noticed people do not recommend using AS5 on the RAM chips. Would using AS Ceramique on the RAM chips be my best solution?

Also there seems to be some kind of mini-core right under the GPU core, anyone know what it is for? My 6800GT AGP has no such thing.

 

[J-Mag]

The reason it is suggested to use ceramique is because it is non conductive and it is possible to bridge a couple of the the pins on the BGA chips, but with the core you are pretty safe.

The smaller chip is the Bridge Chip, it converts AGP signaling to PCI-E because the NV40 (6800 series - the 6800 vanilla PCI-E which is NV41) is not natively designed for PCI-E.