Dev wrote on Jun 9, 2011, 00:20:
Edit: After actually looking at the results its interesting. They got the same temp diff from a dot so small that it didn't cover the whole surface when heatsink was mounted, as the slightly larger dot that did have enough to cover whole surface. Clearly most of the heat transfer is happening in the middle (which is to be expected, thats where the actual chip is). I've done spread type applications before with a very thin layer, its interesting the small dots are a better method.

It seems to be irrelevant that the thermal compound covers the entire CPU surface, since most of the heat is produced at the middle of the processor heatspreader. In addition, it is a well-known fact that a CPU heatspreader is a little concave rather than really flat.