Yeah I did remove the heatsink and replace the thermal pad with IC Diamond 7 (seemed like a good choice to replace the pad due to the thickness of the paste and it being advertised as less prone to bleeding/separating than other pastes). Shouldn't be loose, snugged the heatsink down pretty good but was careful about overtightening as well, have worked with old AthlonXP CPUs and other bare die chips before and didn't want to chip or crack a die or anything.

And as mentioned reported temps always seemed great. Was getting like 40-41C stock I think, 43-44C after replacing the pad and stock fan with a lower RPM model, then up to 47-50C after flashing to 1.2.5 and running at a higher hash rate.

When I get around to taking the case off I'll check everything out and make sure it looks OK. So far it's been hashing away at 4GH/s or so (looks like it only initialized with 13 engines on processor 7 this time I started it up, seems like when it initializes with 14-15 is when it stops working after running for a bit).