Another update on the cooling situation. If you read my post from last night you will know that LiquidPro worked on one machine but not the other. I was very particular about how I applied it and I'm confident I was getting good contact where it was needed. The strange thing is on the machine that it worked well on I actually only coated one chip. Despite that fact, BOTH chips were significantly cooler after running the equipment and both are STILL running cool. (This furthers my suspicion of how accurate the temp sensors actually are) Keep in mind I only touched one chip/heatsink. No arguments from me though. I'll take it. Until I get a rework station and replace the bad mosfets I am happy with how this machine is running.

Now for the bane of my existence machine. I attempted LiquidPro and was not happy with the results at all. At best it yielded no improvement and at worst it ran hotter than before. So I put it back together with the Noctua and it ran pretty much back where it was. On the hot side but still under 100C and still running reliably.

This afternoon a thought occurred to me. Every video I have seen of the paste being redone on these machines shows a TON of thermal paste on the chip from the factory. So far I was just using little gobs on each core like I would for a GPU or CPU. I decided to apply the paste at the volume that I saw in the videos. I figure there are still many of these machines out there that are still operating at good temps in factory form so there must be something to it. I applied so much paste that it covered the sides and even the channels between the chips. I still don't think I used as much as the factory but it was easily 3X what I was using before. I turned on the machine and immediately noticed about a 15C improvement. One of the chips is approaching about 20C improvement after running for a couple hours.

I believe this tells me that the top surface of the chip is not the only area that needs thermal conductivity and adding heat transfer to the sides and channels between does yield additional cooling benefits. Basically I believe anything that has the potential to draw heat away from the chips and increase the surface area contacted by the heatsink will yield positive results. I am going to run the unit like this for 24 hours and if the results are still encouraging I may apply more paste between the chips and to the spacer ring around them. I will post my results if/when I perform the test.