The circle on the chip was caused after the thing on the chip formed. Obviously, that caused terrible contact with the surface. Prior to that, we had cleaned the CPU and found no evidence of poor connectivity like that, so the “cancer” was the cause of it. That said, the grease was laid on a bit heavy for my taste.

I personally have never had a problem with model/stepping-level differences, so I wouldn’t consider it essential. It is, however, bad form if nothing else. It’s probably more of an issue in multi-cpu (not multi-core) setups, which I’ve not dealt with extensively.

When our heat sink properly connects, we also enjoy the cool core temps you mentioned, which is quite nice. Was that for your woodcrest/conroe setup, or your amd gear?

When I mounted mine with artic silver 5 (instead of using the ShinEtsu G751 inegrated on the oem heatsink), i used plastic gloves and spread a thin film on the heat spreader and on the sink, very thin (use gloves to avoid mixing your hand/body oils with the grease/paste), and then used a pea-sized amount in the middle.

I’ve been running mersenne MPRIME 2.53 at torture test #2 (maximum heat) and I cant break 50C core temp.

I’ve since switched to the Intel Woodcrest/Conroe design, and never looked back. Its faster, lower power, and you can actually buy them easily whereas the availability of the Opteron Socket F / 2200 gear is hard to find.

Also, even with boxed processors, AMD sucks at warranty fulfillment. They never seem to have the same model/stepping of CPUs that broke to replace with under warranty. This is especially bad in the 8xx/8xxxx series, where getting warranty fulfillment for me has been impossible.

I’ve also written off Tyan and completely switched to Supermicro and Intel reference servers.