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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.

correct me if i am wrong, but if others suggest that paste is there to provide a thermal connection between a chip and a heat sink, then with heat sink sitting on the top of the chips in s3, I don't see how it could be done by anything other than having paste on the top of the chips (but not necessarily on connectors, I get that).

not sure what you are asking there...

are there other ways to have a thermal connection between chip and heat sink? sure, you can buy thermal pads. search ebay. youll see in the specs that they are massively electrically resistant. need 1000's of volts to make them conduct. Same goes for thermal paste. Its very unlikely that swimming in thermal paste (even on connectors) would cause any problem at all...

yep, but the OP said that cleaning paste improved his machine. If what you are saying is 100% correct about swimming in thermal paste not causing any problems, then why his S3 was improved by removing excess and reapplying some? I just want to understand and from what I heard here, it seems that paste should be on the top of the chip in S3.

After cleaning all the paste off the chips and surrounding PCB, the unit is working at 440 GH/s after 6 hours. All that extra paste can mess with the voltages on a chip and cause hardware issues. Thermal paste should always be on top of the chip with none running over the sides. On a full sized CPU an amount the size of a pea should be applied. On a small ASIC chip the paste should be just a tiny amount and let the heat sink spread it out. If mine is not that bad, all I can think is some dude with a Taco Bell sour cream gun filled with thermal paste is shooting this stuff on.

what ?? your saying taco bell uses thermal paste ?? you are right the thermal past should not be gooped on the chip covering the entire chip connectors and other nearby electronic components. i always replace stock thermal paste on pretty much everything anyways: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835426035

Best practice to ensure you don't get too much is to put a small amount on the chip then spread it evenly with a business card, drivers license or the like. The layer of paste in most cases only needs to be a couple mils thick. It's only intended to take up any air gaps between the chip and heatsink, nothing more. Additionally, thermal paste such as Arctic Silver have silver particles in it so yes it will conduct electricity.

what is the point of thermal paste to conduct electricity? I think that you are incorrect. silver is there to conduct heat better. Because silver particles are surrounded by non-conductive filler, electricity is NOT conducted.
see:
http://www.arcticsilver.com/as5.htm

Not Electrically Conductive:
Arctic Silver 5 was formulated to conduct heat, not electricity.
(While much safer than electrically conductive silver and copper greases, Arctic Silver 5 should be kept away from electrical traces, pins, and leads. While it is not electrically conductive, the compound is very slightly capacitive and could potentially cause problems if it bridges two close-proximity electrical paths.)

Conductive/capacitive, whatever. My point is still valid, don't use too much paste.