ASUS Maximus II Formula - new P45 king?

[zoob]

Dunno what happened but my M2F started freaking out on me this weekend.

Played some L4D, and it started stuttering... the display driver kept failling but it'd recover. So I decided to stress test and my OC was unstable it seemed.
Then I pulled my PC out and opened it up, and it started freezing in the BIOS! I noticed the NB temps were rather high so I figured maybe my MCW60 was pulling it away from the board.

Today I rebuilt the thing, added washers to the NB, meanwhile I noticed the heat pads were leaking some kind of grease/oil all over (it looked wet). Cleaned it all up...
Seemed to work fine again, until I run a stress test for 15 min -- all temps normal but it freezes.

I pull out my LCD poster and it gets stuck on VGA BIOS. Try a PCI video card it works fine.
Move my 8800GTS into the second PCI-E slot and it works fine. Move it back to the first slot and it fails every time.

Looks like it's time for RMA

EDIT: It occured to me that the GPU might be half fried working only in 8X mode, so I'm gonna get another video card to test with tomorrow. :|