Found out why one of my units was not hashing and having X's on the chips. Paste was everywhere on the inside. Even the screws holding the heat sink on had thermal paste on them.
images removed
Messy paste wont effect anything but poor cooling, unless your units are overheating, that's not the problem
His look far better than mine did... lol. I had paste on the chips, on the pcb, on the connectors... everywhere.
please tell the motherboard tinkering noob (myself)-where the paste is supposed to be and where it isn't?
I ordered some in case in my batch 2 I would need to clean it up and reapply, but have no clue where it supposed to go-under the chip, to the side of it or on top of it (judging by some posted pictures there are gobs on top)?
It's thermal conducting paste. It's meant to move heat from chip to heat sink (big metal finned bit). The idea is not to have a gap between the chip and the heat sink. Or air pockets because air is an insulator. So just enough thermal paste to form a nice seal between the chip and heat sink. It's not electrically conductive. So it shouldn't matter if there's some overflow. But if he said cleaning it up made the difference. Who am I to argue?
What you don't want to do is remove it and replace it with nothing. (The paste that is) the chips will definitely run hotter than normal then