Smelt the magic smoke and screen went white/crashed while gaming.  On restart Windows would start to load but crash so I did a reinstall.  Now I can get into windows, but as soon as I try to install an nvidia driver, it crashes.  I removed the back plate and found clear grease or oil on the pads around the back of the GPU.  Is this electrolyte that has leaked out of the caps?  I could not find anything else abnormal, though I did not check the other side of the card.  Is this a common failure mode, none of the smd caps look burned?
 
Also, is the temp reported not a good indication of the rest of the card.  I don't think I ever saw it get above 58C, usually full load gaming is 55-56C.

'' Now I can get into windows, but as soon as I try to install an nvidia driver, it crashes ''
 
I agree  ,  I tend to find with that  the card maybe bad  when it don't take its driver  even if it seems fine in safe mode after you try same / another driver with a fresh download  incase of any downloading corruption involved  
 
the standard vga driver default built in to windows  is just  a min to get a card for initial display and low power states   the main driver from NVidia puts the card in its full states  and that's where it fails 
 
'' Smelt the magic smoke and screen went white/crashed while gaming '' 
 
with that then you hope the card was fully the blame  not something causing the card to fail  / get damaged ??     that's a roll the dice after you get a replacement card 
 
good luck