I had some time to tinker around with the data again and tried my hand at a "watts dissipated" graph:
http://www.abload.de/img/10cg7dw.jpg
What has me worried about this is that it scatters my data points all over the place.
It would be nice to get more precision here. I think the graphs above show that longer load times wouldn't help me here. High-precision thermal probes of some type would be very nice, but they won't do much good if I can't hook them up to the PC to have them log their readings somehow. Any suggestions?
I was considering a Crystalfontz a while back, btw. The reason I didn't go for it is because while it has higher resolution than .5°, it's thermal probes have a precision of only .5°. So it was either the bigNG (very precise digital probes, but only .5° resolution) or the Fontz (high reolution, .5° precision probes). Seems to me that neither is better than the other...
@posts above: What the hell is wrong with M4 screws? How could threadless holes possibly be better than M4?