Removing Afterarket Cooler (Accelero XTREME 5970)

[hotel77]

I'm in a bit of a bind. My 5970 recently stopped responding...the fans power on but no signal is sent to the monitor. I bought it from someone else, and they had installed an Accelero XTREME 5970 aftermarket cooler. He included the original cooler.

I'm hoping to attempt to send it in for an RMA, after I replace the Accelero. After looking through the instructions for installing the Accelero, it looks like it's simply held on by a few screws and back braces.

My issue is...after removing the screws it seems like all the "thermal pads" that the Accelero calls for has fused the cooler to the GPUs...and so i'm figuratively and literally stuck. Anyone have any experience with this, or any ideas on safely removing the aftermarket cooler?

 

[notty22]

After double checking you have no screw heads visible holding the heat sink on, you should try a heat gun or your ladies hair dryer to warm things up to separate the two.
Those models had a problem of melting the thermal pads from over-heating. Especially the VRM's.
Radeon 5970 Overclocking: The VRM Temperature Bottleneck
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3590