Dear, sweet mother of @#%@#%^@%$^$#$#^$#^$@#^$#^@%^$%^$%. I have never been so stressed out and/or frustrated in all my life.

Last night whilst browsing the interwebs, I looked at my CPU temperature and noticed it looked a bit high for what it should be with my Vendetta 2 heatsink. I had had the guys at the shop re apply paste already, but it still seemed to be idling a bit high. This had bothered me for a while, but I only really got struck with the urge to do something about it 24 hours ago.

I promptly searched around to see what different methods of applying the paste there were. After much searching I stumbled across this wondeful little tutorial type deal that walks you through several techniques this guy tried before finding the best solution. I said to myself, "Self, how hard could this possibly be?" MAN was I stupid hahaha.

So I sat in c1ass all day, thinking about how awesome it will be to pull off the heatsink and do it myself, woefully unaware of the torture I was about to put myself through.

Anyway, I got home, and took out my old computer to practice a bit with dissmantling a heatsink. This would prove to be futile, as it was an AMD processor (they mount differently) and in a much less busy case. I moved on anyway, and begain the delicate operation.

I knew within the first 10 minutes that this would not be the quick in and out I was hoping for. Even in my fairly spacious tower, and with a motherboard that is set up to more or less be a lesser pain in the but when installing heatsinks, my giant hands had a painfully awkward time getting to the push pins. I eventually got the heatsink off, and immediately noticed that the paste that was on there wasn't spreading across the whole CPU. So I removed the paste, thinking how much smoother this was going now that it was off. Little did I know that putting the thing back on was going to be a circus.

I had to eventually take the tower's exhaust fan off, and take my RAM out, just so I could BARELY get my hands to the pins well enough to get a good grasp of them. After failing to even get the spreaders through the holes, dad had had enough and decided we should actually figure the mechanism out first. Eventually dad figured that you had to twist it all the way in one direction to unlock and pull the pin back to stop the spreader from being activated. Then you had to turn it half way back to push the pin down to secure it to the board, and then make one more half twist to lock it in place.

Figuring it out was the easy part.

Doing all of that basically blind was a complete circus. I don't know what OCZ was on when they decided that you could successfully push two pins on the diagonals at the same time, and that it was the best way to do it. Maybe you can, and we're just stupid, but we basically just had to go on intuition and a bit of luck. Eventually, it was in place. I know it's a good spread as we had to unmount the heatsink half way through due to one pin locking before being through the Mobo's hole. This was the only realy disturbance the new paste went through, so hopefully it didn't mess things up too bad.

So far things look pretty good. Where as I was idling around 44-45C while firefox was running and watching a video, and around 43C on the desktop idling, it's now around 40-41 in the browser and 39-40 on the desktop. This is all with my finally proven stable 3.6 ghz overclock, so I imagine I might have even lower temps if I was running stock.

This was definitely an interesting venture, and although it was incredibly intense and frustrating at times, I'm glad I did it for the experience. However, having said that I don't want to ever have to do it again for a VERY long time. My thumbs won't be able to handl it.

EDIT: Turns out I was a bit off on temps. It idols on the desktop at 37C! This is outstanding, and almost a 5C difference which is pretty substantial. Huzzah!

Have a good one,

XR