GPU Failure and Potential Recovery

Greetings!

Usually I can handle most troubleshooting, but this particular issue has gone beyond what I'm used to. I have a Sapphire Dual-X 280x that has gone into, what appears to be heat failure. For the past several weeks, I've had graphic errors (drawing errors not screen tearing or anything like that) in a heavily modded Skyrim (modded pre-Steam fiasco btw). I had assumed at the time that it was due to complications from the vast number of mods since every other game I played was fine. This conclusion was reinforced by the fact that HWMonitor never reported a GPU temp beyond 68C

Within this last weekend, I had updated my drivers to the most recent beta. Upon launching TF2, my graphics severely corrupted and drew a grid, but nothing else. I could tell the game kept running due to sounds, but the graphics were definitely dead. Thinking it was related to the drivers, I did a clean install of the latest betas, and launched Skryim to test (since it's more demanding). This killed the GPU. It locked up again and then started throwing all kinds of errors even when not accelerating.

I quickly shut down the system and checked the card. The heat sink and core was warm, but not concerning; the GPU-board near the PCI-e slot on the other hand was very hot. I opened up the GPU and restated everything, even replacing a bunch of the thermal pads. Now, the GPU draws two lines across the screen and fails to draw anything when Windows takes over operations. There is some discoloration on the GPU near some VRMs, but the shipped thermal pad was torn/stuck there so I can't tell if it's heat damage or just glue damage.

I've replaced the GPU, but before I install anything I want to verify that nothing else will die. Are there any recommendations on how to proceed? Does anyone know tricks that could recover the "dead" GPU?

[Computer Specs](http://www.overclock.net/lists/display/view/id/3869055)