What are you saying, you removed the front plate completely?? Man, i wouldn't recommend running bare VRM's on a 300W card. Maybe your VRM's were overheating before due to bad thermal tape mount or bad contact with the plate.

I'm going to put an additional fan to cool the front plate and see if it helps voltage scaling. I want 950Mhz benchable real bad without going too much ghetto with my case/cooling setup.