dsfantom

Seems to me there should have been AS on the heatsink, too. I scraped off the little heat transfer pad that Thermaltake originally put on the heatsink, because I had read it didn't work. Maybe I need that pad back. Thanks,

Not great news about the board being a source of problems. I am on my second board. The first one had the cooling fan give up on the via chip. I suppose I'll know more after I get another processor. But, when using the Arctic Silver, shouldn't there be some indication on the heat sink that it actually is in contact with the processor pad? I didn't have any AS residue on the sink after I removed it, though the AS was on the processor pad. Sorry, I'm not Kevin, but I might have some of his bad luck. This is my second try at building a computer from parts, and neither has worked well. The system I am using now has an AMD 700MHz processor with an Asus board. It locks up regularly for no good reason. I used to think the problem might be with Windows 98 (and I'm still not convinced it isn't), so I got the upgrade to 98SE, hoping the problems would clear up. No such good luck. So maybe there is something in the hardware that causes the problems. Thanks for the help.

Thanks for the reply.

Got an AMD 1.4GHz processor with Shuttle board. Also got a Thermaltake Volcano 6CU fan. Removed the thermal transfer pad, as suggested by several people, and put Arctic Silver on the copper base. CPU ran mid 50s on temp, even at low load. Finally quit Saturday night completely. Won't even boot. Tried to clean heatsink and reinstall. Noticed that the Arctic Silver doesn't seem to contact the CPU processor. Looks like the rubber pads on the corners of the CPU hold the fan above the processor. Do I need to reinstall a thermal pad on the heatsink, or am I missing something really simple here? Thanks for the help.