i decided to clean off the stock TIM on my 6600GT and after cleaning it off with ArctiClean solution this came to show:

I thot it would be mirror like, but the right side of it seems to have corroded. what could be the cause of this?

heres another shot of it:

Might've been some of the thermal grease having a bit of moist or something. And with the heat it caused that.

But that doesn't look corroded, at least not in the shots. It looks like it was scratched

If it doesn't work your could RMA it if your manufacturer's warranty has not expired yet.

the card still works.. but i want a perfect (if not, almost perfect) card ive seen other shots of cores before and they look like jewels.. mine looks like a piece of junk with scratches on it *sigh*

I can't tell from the picture, is it scratched on the edge or pitted/chipped. I've had CPU and VPU cores with chipping on the side. Not suprisingly, most of these are ones with tight fitting or very heavy/awkward heatsinks installed. But your right, this calls for my favorite word for a situation such as this, "bummer." But, on the bright side, I never noticed any difference in cooling performance between perfect chips and their slightly damaged siblings.

hard to say from the picture. just test the card to see if you see any artifacts, if you do, Rma the card.

the 'corrosion' (whatever it may be) sticks out because it catches the cloth/paper towel when i clean it.

however, there are no artifacting of the card unless its OC'ed to like 551/1100mhz which kinda sucks.

in terms of cooling.. i applied new AS5 in it.. 200hours is a long time to see its full effect. so far I've only seen like no more than 1 degree difference. the only instant effect i saw was prolly that the card doesnt go as high as 90C anymore.. jus 74C well.. some times 80 depends on room temps

I'm sure that isn't corrosion, and it doesn't look bad - actually a lot of GPUs look like that after cleaning, perfect specimes aren't that frequent as you make them to be.


Don't worry about that few extra scratches if the card performs fine, it's not like you're looking on at the GPU every minute of every day, you shouldnt care how it looks if it performs like it's supposed to

But anyway, that looks like some of the thermal grease was left over, probably sticking to the GPU cause of the heat - or are that real scratches? - hard to tell from the pics.