Best thing to clean Arctic Silver off of a CPU is WD40 and Q-Tips, spray the WD40 onto the Q-Tip and use Q-Tip to remove AS, then clean the CPU with Alcohol or Windex and Q-Tip to remove the WD40 residue. You can always tell if a Athlon fried by either smelling it, they really smell burn't when they fry, and looking on the bottom inbetween the resistor packs to see if it is darkend or burnt looking, or if they look like they have leaked an oily substance. I have a fried 1900XP that has a slightly burnt mark between the resistor packs on the bottom and all of the packs look like they have leaked-shiny around them, looks wet. Hope you bought a retail CPU, RMA time, otherwise, looks like your buying a new CPU.