You're very welcome Tasty. There is a great bunch of folks here. We work hard to get everything we can out of our gear. From what I'm hearing from others that you have sent paste to, they will be breaking rigs down this weekend for test. So, I hope we see more results here to compare to.

Thank you for commenting. I'll go to the single blob as you suggest on the next mount. That one will be against a 6 month old Shin Etsu mount on my mass water cooler. I'm looking forward to see what happens there.

On this last X3350 mount, note that I have two hot cores. I think this is native to the heat spreader on this chip. I tried many mounts, patterns, etc to try and get core 0 and 1 down, no luck thus far. Latest data with 8 hours of run time is Coretemp 62,62,53,48 Ambient 20.8C. So, core 2 and 3 have cooled a bit with the ambient drop overnight. Core 0 and 1 have stayed up a bit more, I think this is a manifestation of a possible IHS problem on the die.

As you mention, it is possible the 9700 cooler on this last rig is a bit whimpy. I'll mod it to increase the pressure. I think that's a weak point in the Zalman design. They are somewhat whimpy right out of the box.

I think the ThermalRight Ultra Extreme (TRUE), in the first test, has first class pressure. I REALLY like the metal backplate they put on that. I can crank it all the way down and not worry about warping the board so much. I wish I had some of those plates for my Fuzion blocks...

Your pressure explanation fits with my test results. The TRUE mount performed better than the 9700 mount. I'll go back and beef up the pressure on the 9700 and re-apply in the single blob technique.

Also of note to other testers, you want to really clean the bee-jeebers out of the old mount. Get all of that old paste off so you don't skew your results. I have been using acetone in between all mounts and have been careful to clean thoroughly.

Regards,
Bob