Sniggle,

I'm beginning to suspect there's a heatsink contact issue with some. Here's my story for last night:

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...I don't believe the ZeroTherm Nirvana NV120 is compatible with the ABIT IP35 Pro. I spent five hours last night reseating it about a dozen times, cleaning thermal paste each time. It is an absolute nightmare. I began reseating it because my load temps would reach TJMax. OK, so I reseated it and it was obvious it hadn't been properly seated. Fine. Reseated it, issue persisted. After finally tightening the bracket connecting the mounting screws to the cooler, it had sufficient contact for a 45 idle - 75 load. I removed because when OCing to 4GHz it'd overheat and shut down and tried reseating it - when I removed it, I noticed that it STILL didn't appear to have proper contact.

To make a long, very painful story short, if you mount the heatsink with the fan facing the front or rear of the case, then the side bars on the mounting bracket will come into contact with the two capacitors above the CPU socket, and I think that's where proper contact is being prevented. If you face the fan down towards the video card, then the fan hits the northbridge heatsink. If you face the face up towards top of the case, well, that's how I last tested it and it's getting crap temperatures (60-90)

With a cooler like this with an E8400, since it's comparable to a TRUE 120 I'd expect then temps between 30-50 at stock, at MOST.
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...so for heat/cooling issues, I wonder if the two capacitors above the CPU socket are hitting other heatsink screw mount brackets and preventing proper contact. If you remove your heatsink, does the thermal paste appear to have spread properly?