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#31
Pretty weird. You only need a little bit of thermal paste. I usually spread it with a credit card to only leave a thin layer. Other put a little amount in the center of the cpu and let the heatsink spread it evenly.
You need to clean the heatsink and cpu completely with alcool/clean rag (and credit card if old thermal paste is hard) before applying the new one.
The only other things I see is bad seating of the cooler and defect CPU. You can take a look at this video to see how to seat CPU and heatsink properly with core i7 (advance to 2 min) :
installing intel core i7 processor to gigabyte motherboard - YouTube
If everything is ok, you may have a bad cpu, I would return it with the case if you bought it locally and tell them about the problem for them to look by themself. If you bought it online, they will probably agree to proceed to an exange when you'll tell them about the problem.
Maybe others have good tips too, good luck !
Last edited by pominator; 21 Dec 2011 at 08:14.