shoot, i think my OS install is a bit fubar, i can't read any bios with nibitor 4.3... ah well, i'll try again on a diff system tomorrow morning when i get back in the office.

Blah... You might be right... i was under the impression that it was a die shrink....or something....

You know what? I'm going to try to SLI this with an 8800GT

The AC Freezer Pro 7 comes with a precoat of Arctic Cooling MX-1, which isn't bad when it comes preapplied (I have a tube of it and it's impossible to spread manually). You don't need AS5 with the precoat, but if you want to use it anyways, scrape it off the Heatsink before applying AS5.

You do want to clean off the CPU with a cotton swab and alcohol as esn2500 suggested, though. I forgot all about that and I do it every day, lol.

As for spreading the thermal paste... there's a lot of ways people suggest doing it. using a credit card to spread a thin layer gives you the most control over where the thermal paste spreads, which is why I reccomend doing it that way.... a thin line through the middle of your CPU should work too though. The pressure of the heatsink will usually cause the thermal paste to spread out pretty evenly.

Some heatsinks come with a preapplied thermal interface. Sometimes this is a pad, other times it is a thin coat of thermal paste. If your heatsink had some gunk (usually grayish in color) on the bottom of it, it had preapplied thermal paste.

If your heatsink did not have preapplied thermal paste, it probably came with a small packet of white or grey thermal paste. This stuff is usually OK, but not great. Arctic silver isn't bad. I like Tuniq Tx-2.

Basically, to spread thermal paste, use a credit card or razor blade to spread a thin layer of thermal paste across the top of your CPU while it is the socket.

Don't spread the paste while your CPU is out of the socket because that increases the chances of screwing something up (like getting thermal paste on the socket/pins). My co-worker keeps taking the CPU out of the socket to spread thermal paste and it drives me crazy, because he keeps screwing up and never learning...