dixieflatline

not to beat a dead horse (this topic seems to be well covered before I got here) but in my understanding, no thermal compound is required. what thermal paste does is fill any gaps where your CPU core is not in contact with your heatsink. thermal paste has a lower heat conductivity than putting your heatsink in direct contact with your CPU (yes, even arctic silver). if you lapped your CPU and heat sink until they were perfectly smooth then you would eliminate the need for paste. if you do not lap your CPU and heat sink be sure to use as little paste as possible to cover your cpu core. any more than that will actually reduce heat transfer. hope this was helpful and good luck with your new CPU

and all I need to do to unlock my 2600 (166 FSB) is close the L1 bridges to open up the lower multipliers, no L10 stuff at all right?

hmm, thanks all. I'll try getting a new battery, see if that fixes things. it's annoying since the problem is intermittant which makes it hard to isolate. it doesn't go into BIOS (ver 1001.G) when it has a prob, just says the FSB is at 100 on post and continues to boot. WCPUID confirms the FSB is low so I know it's not some error on the post screen. I hadn't even worried about it that much since it only goes wrong about one boot in three but I'm getting ready to OC so I want everything running right before I start. I'll let you know how this turns out (and if the problem was the battery, Asus too). thanks again

greets all, I've been having intermittant problems with my A7N8X. Sometimes when I boot up it will drop the FSB down to 100 as opposed to 166 and some of my settings may get reset. I checked it with my meter and the battery is making 2.8 volts which seems a little low since the battery is labled 3v. I read something awhile back about some of these boards being shipped with weak batteries but now I can't find anything. Any help is appreciated dixieflatline