paul: arctic silver V (5) is the best thermal paste to use, and my god is it messy!
get a good clean environment before you apply it, and remember you only want a thin! film across the surface of the cpu. (i have a friend who applied too much, apparently it actually burned his cpu out!)
the above methods should work (i use the good old credit card to spread it in a thin film across the surface and then attach the hsf)
have a go putting the hsf into the slot before you do any of this though, it's quite a scary experience even without the cpu involved as it appears to apply a fair bit of pressure to get it into the slot, but dont worry about that as long as you dont force anything!
most people here seem to reccommend putting a small blob on the cpu and spreading with the hsf otherwise, i'm sure thats fine too, mine created a fair bit of mess creating an even layer, and took some time
This would be the recomendation for AS3 , but not AS5.
what kind of warranty do the OEM cpu's come with? I bought a retail cpu myself purely for the assurance of warranty, and just have the stock hsf sitting in its box)
OEM is 3months or 31days, Retail is 3years.
I used winflash on the front link, slightly confusing interface at first, but appears to be easy enough to use. I know this has been asked somewhere but is there any way to find out what version of bios you are using? (actually cpu-z does report the date, so i guess that's how it is worked out)
Yes it can be a little confusing, but I'm glad you worked it out. I dont see it been any more complex then DOS based flash though.
As for new Nvidia drivers, they are old now , the link to drivers on the first posts goes right to the latest ( and always be updated)
If your not running 6.39 do it now.
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