Haha. I remember there was a stream some guy ran where he unintentionally broke everything while building a PC. Probably made a mint in the process.
Regarding the hack saw: The warranty was done the moment I started screwing about. Thought I could take part of the old heatsink and trim it down to make a nice little bit to cool off some of the chips. Using sticky heat pads, of course!
It's not like I tried cutting the card itself in two! Punch line being that even the trimmed down bit was too big.

But yeah. Not sure where down the path things went wrong, but the card is a goner. Probably a bit of metal somewhere touching something which caused it to have a blow out.
In my defence, the card sounded like a jet engine the moment it got slightly taxed. Thought a 30 quid fan replacement job would do the trick. The gamble didn't pay off!