So this is a <i>slight</i> necro but not worthy of a new topic to state how important applying the right amount of thermal grease on the CPU is:
A couple days ago I noticed Win 7 said I only had 2GB of RAM despite having 8GB. I went into BIOS and it too only recognised 2GB. Long story short, the memory stick in DIMM 1 died a death but before figuring this out I googled the problem and a lot of people said it can be due to the CPU or heatsink pressing down on the CPU pins too hard (bizzare, no?). I reseated the CPU, cleaned the grease off, applied a good whack of new grease and booted up. Idle temps were ~45 deg and even a Source game could raise it to 80+. F1 2012 got it to almost 100 before it crashed.
Cleaned the grease off again, applied a much smaller amount (approx half a pea size in the centre), decided to reseat the heatsink and fan to blow horizontally to the back and I'm sitting at a more comfy 35 deg idle.
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A couple days ago I noticed Win 7 said I only had 2GB of RAM despite having 8GB. I went into BIOS and it too only recognised 2GB. Long story short, the memory stick in DIMM 1 died a death but before figuring this out I googled the problem and a lot of people said it can be due to the CPU or heatsink pressing down on the CPU pins too hard (bizzare, no?). I reseated the CPU, cleaned the grease off, applied a good whack of new grease and booted up. Idle temps were ~45 deg and even a Source game could raise it to 80+. F1 2012 got it to almost 100 before it crashed.
Cleaned the grease off again, applied a much smaller amount (approx half a pea size in the centre), decided to reseat the heatsink and fan to blow horizontally to the back and I'm sitting at a more comfy 35 deg idle.