Help Applying Thermal Grease

[artushka24]

I finally ordered the rest of my parts for my Core i7 gaming rig (EVGA X58 Tri-Sli motherboard, two 6GB OCZ Gold DDR3 PC3 12800 ram kits, and a Cooler Master V8 Cpu cooler). Along with the order I picked up some Arctic Silver 5 thermal grease. The thing is I've never applied any thermal compounds before and do not know how. I've googled it and browsed through Arctic's official website for instructions but all sources seem to have a different way of doing it. I know that previously compounds had to be spread out evenly over the entire surface of the processor but Arctic suggests that for dual core and quads a thin horizontal line be applied across the center of the chip and not spread out. They say applying the heatsink will "squish" the compound and spread it out. How should I go about applying Arctic Silver on my i7 920? I want to do it once and do it right. I'm afraid i won't have enough if i just use the line method and i'm not sure how effective it would be to just spread out the compound all over the cpu. How much should I apply and how much is too much (obviously if it's going over the edges of the cpu/heatsink and onto the socket/motherboard there's way too much). Thanks in advance guys.

[flanzig1]

The way I do it is put a dot of compound in the midle of the CPU heatspreader and spread it aroundevenly with my finger wrapped in plastic. Then I use something stiff with a straight edge tp scrap off any excess.
The amount left on the CPU should be not much more than a haze.

[not important]

From Artic Silver: http://www.arcticsilver.com/pdf/appi..._dual_wcap.pdf

[Matt_Smi]

Another good article...

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.ph...=170&Itemid=38