Quote Originally Posted by massman View Post
The IOH on the MSI X58 boards is indeed a bit more hot than on other boards; no idea why, though. If it was bad contact, the IOH heatsink wouldn't feel that hot.
i got an eclipse board which would probably fall into the bad contact type heh

i think it may have been a demo/press sample board or something cause of the packaging, also 3xplastic clips broke off that hold the IOH and that smaller heatsink in place but i dont care about that...my point i am actually making is that the heatsinks were making poor contact with some really weird red paste. The paste was rock hard (assuming it was a paste at some point lol). i tried to slowly scrape it off the heatsinks and will have to sand them a bit as there are a few minor marks from blades

the heatsinks made about 20% contact with the chips. i dont know if this is just this board but maybe some more attention needs to be paid to this if this is more common particularly if they run hotter on average. i havent tried it yet but hopefully nothing else was damaged with that heatsink banging on the board in transport.