Overheating, and subsequent failure

This is more a cautionary story than asking for advise, though if you have any that would be most welcome too (the situation seems pretty hopeless to me).

My former main graphics card, an 8800GT now sits in my secondary PC folding, as you can see below, and this secondary machine also acts as a NAS. I wanted to add a nice Raid5 array to my NAS so I purchased a very reasonably priced raid pci-x card on fleabay, and it arrived this morning.

The case of this secondary PC is a bit tight, so it neccessitated the 8800GT be removed from the case, to add the extra hard drive and cable everything up.

Everything looks good, the PC goes on. Boots into windows, the raid array is working, happy times. Suddenly there is a slightly strange smell, and the display driver has to reboot. Oh dear. I quickly shut off the PC, and go to remove the graphics card. OUCH! That is hot hot hot hot hot. I must have not connected the fan from the Vortexx Neo to the motherboard properly. No worries, thats easily fixed. So I do that and turn it back on again. This time the PC gets into windows and then the picture vanishes.

It turns out that the fan was plugged in just fine, but somehow when I had taken the 8800GT out of the case, a small plastic clip had wedged itself in the Vortexx Neo's fan, rendering it unable to rotate and causing the overheating. Now of course I have rectified the problem and the fan is spinning fine, but I fear it is too late, I have not been able to get a picture out of the card.

I probably would have got away with this cockup, but F@H is set to run at startup, so immediately I booted into windows, the GPU was loaded up 100%. I think its probably dead, but I'm not sure. How hot does something have to be to actually render completely dead rather than just a temporary fail. What is my best course of action from here? Has anyone ever had an overheated GPU come back to life? (Give me some hope guys! I was top HeXus producer on F@H for all of a day!)

The joy of PC maintenance and carelessness! Adding a hard drive and raid card leads to GPU meltdown :censored:

you never know your luck but i wouldnt hold my breath, recently killed a radeon 3870 in a similar manner in my eagerness to water cool it i hadnt secured a ram heat sink proper and the card gradually became more unstable before finally refusing to post even after the ram heat sink was secured proper

if it isnt working after the fan was fixed and the card had cooled it probably wont work again imo

Even more worrying news, it seems the PC wont POST at all now. Despite the fact that it was fully working. I tried it with a spare 4670 I have, and I'm getting no video and no POST beep.

Also getting no error code if I remove the RAM. Worrying times!

Seems like my problem may no longer belong in this section.

I noticed that the 4670 fan doesnt spin when I use that card, possibly the PCI-E socket has gone.

Also slightly strange, although fans, hard drives, and LED's on the motherboard come on, the LED's on the front of the case do not come on.

I think the 770-C45 may have died... although I'm not really sure how. Would it be usual for a overheating GPU to cause a complete system failure?

I have tried two PSU's, both of which should have been more than powerful enough to power the system. So pretty much it seems that Motherboard or CPU has somehow been affected by something I've done :( Unless you can come up with any solutions.