New Numbers.
I did several trial runs of putting down some thermal, and screwing the heat sink on to see how the paste would spread.
Placing the dot in the middle of the cpu hardly even covered the middle though. Two lines on the heat sink between the pipes didn't look to have nearly enough coverage either and was taller then long. So neither seemed to be evenly distributed at all. Plus it looked like it was still thick (grey and goopy as appose to a translucent layer)
I eventually did similar to what i did the first time, placing a bit in the middle of the chip and using a coffe filter to spread it around so there was a light grey layer you could still see the chip through. Then I put the Heat sink immediately on it this time, and screwed it in tight. Then i ran some numbers.
This time I used the Everest Ultima trial version to stress test the machine, as well as the Prime95 (blend and full heat). Note I only ran the test for a few minutes, not hours.
Before I reset my heat sink, the core cpu temps after the machine had been running for 20 hours were
Idle: 52C
Everest stress: 78C
PrimeFull: 93C
After I reset my heat sink the core cpu temps after 2 minutes were
Idle: 52C
Everest strees: 74C
Prime Full: 86C
So there is some diffrence. Not as much as I'd like to have seen (and my seating technique still leaves a bit to be desired) but a little better then before. The full load test are a bit better to, so at least im comfortable with it now.
It might go down a few more C after the thermal settles. I was also getting idle times about 5-7C cooler with the case open. My actually work space probably is a little warmer as far as ambient temperature.
But until I actually have a need to overclock the cpu a bit, I don't think I'll worry about it again. It would have been nice to get it from 2.6 to 3.0 easy without having to worry about temps at all.