Bare chips (regarding ram) are often better off than chips with a layer of thermal tape or pad on them. The stuff is horrible and the design of the heatsinks often leads to a lack of uniformity in cooling capabilities even if you removed the tape/pad.
Your ram probably died or degraded due to poor long-term testing from the manufacturer.
As to "hand picking" chips for high end cards, do you really think they put that much work into them when their assembly methods and QC is as bad as it is?
They dont bother to bin the chips, they just give them a quick tolerance test, but it doesnt really matter when you cant build or attach the heatsink properly. The fact that they pass the quick tolerance test is about the only reason they tend to do better. Typically (not always) chips that wouldnt have passed the test (a hot/leakage test seems to be the norm) performs better under cold due to internal leakage characteristics.
Honestly the margins are getting rather thin..
This is why I buy high end video cards and use a full cover water block on them.
Asus Z9PE-D8 WS with 64GB of registered ECC ram.|Dell 30" LCD 3008wfp:7970 video card
LSI series raid controller
SSDs: Crucial C300 256GB
Standard drives: Seagate ST32000641AS & WD 1TB black
OSes: Linux and Windows x64
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