Did I apply too much thermal paste?!?

[Zinthar]

I am running an E6400 on the Gigabyte DS3 mobo with a Zalman 9500CNPS HS. I upped the vCORE voltage to 1.400 V

I use ITAT to monitor core temps and Orthos CPU stress test for the load temps and am getting the following:

@ 2.13 Ghz (stock speed):
Idle: 40 degrees C
Load: 48-50 degrees C

Overclocked @ 3.4 Ghz:
Idle: 50 degrees C
Load: 65 degrees C

If I turn on ITAT's 100% workload level I can get the cores @ 3.4 Ghz to get just over 70 degrees. Should I be concerned about these kinds of temps? Even when the cores are reading 70 degrees, I can touch the copper fins of the Zalman heatsink and they feel cool to the touch (I can't reach all the way down to see how warm the base is though).

Does it sound like the spread from my idle to load temps is too low, indicating that perhaps I don't have the heatsink seated properly or used too much Arctic silver on it?

 

[pkrush]

Since your processor is running so hot and the heatsink feels cool, I'm guessing that you actually used too LITTLE thermal paste. Many Core 2's have concave heat spreaders, so more thermal paste is required to fill the gap. I'd pull the heatsink off and look, you'll be able to tell if it isn't making adequate contact in the center of the processor. You can fix this by lapping your CPU, but I can't give you any advice on that.

 

[Billb2]

Lapping instructions and kits.
http://www.easypckits.com/