Get the arctic surface purifier. It will last you a long while too as you do not need a whole lot to clean the surface of your hsf and cpu:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16835100010
You can overclock your C2D with the pre-applied thermal past on the stock HSF, but do not expect miracles and stunning overclock results.
A cheap heatsink on new egg can get you quite far for overclocking. At this moment, I am using an rather old HSF from my old setup that ran a Athlon XP 2600+ @ stock.
I am still using my Zalman CNPS 7000cu-LED. @ idle the processor sits at around 30C and load during gaming around 45C and Orthos 100% load after 3 hours @ 59C. This will be replaced next week by a lapped Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme with a Scythe S-Flex SFF21F.
If you want drastic cooling perfomance I can suggest
1- AS-5
2- Lapping your IHS to a nice flash smooth surface or mirror finish (starting from 300 grit all the way up to 2000 grit)
3- Lapping your HSF to a mirror finish.
4- adding more fans to your case both intake and exhaust.
5- The most drastic measure to cool your cpu, removal of the IHS (I do not suggest doing this!!)
IMPORTANT!!!
Lapping or removing your IHS will void your warranty.
I did lapped my Zalman cooler to a mirror finish. from 220 grit to 1500. it took me a good 2 hours to get to this result.
When you apply AS-5 you only need a small thin vertical line across your Core 2 Duo's IHS. On the following link, choose which cpu you are going to choose to apply AS-5 on:
http://www.arcticsilver.com/in...ute_step2intelas5.html
This video might me of some help:
http://video.google.com/videop...&type=search&plindex=0
Good Luck!
