I got to disagree. The way McGyver put his thermal paste might be correct for his cooler, for mine I used the classic round little pee since there's a shit ton of presure. McGyver gets good temps, so this can't have been bad.
its supposed to be a thin film covering your whole cpu. thermal paste is there to fill surface imperfections since air is a bad heat conductor. if you dont distribute it evenly the cpu may heat up uneven aswell ... ... but from my personal experience, as long as you use thermal paste its fine. the details are overrated, as are those super special thermal pastes.
The main thing with thermal paste is not to use stuff that conducts electricity. (some thermal pastes that come with coolers do....) I killed a whole cpu + motherboard just because one tiny microscopic bit of thermal paste caused a short.
I tried to line it up, like cocain! But seriously, I actually read somewhere that since the actual CPU under that heatspreader has more length than width a central line from top to bottom is the prefered way of application. See http://images.anandtech.com/doci/9483/Die.jpeg Anyways it does not matter, since you put pressure on it and the wonders of physics will distribute it uniformly across the surface.
So I have two problems: 1) Everything runs stable at 4.4ghz including stress tests, but GTA V likes to crash after an hour of playing: Is the game known for crashing or is it the CPU? 2) Can't boot from USB-stick anymore, Ubuntu, Mint, Kali all hang after a few secs of booting.
I would assume the usb booting issue is from something in the bios not set right, I couldn't see any issues to do with cpu or what you have installed. Or actually, I remember some chipsets get funny with certain ports on mother boards, I remember an issue with the one I had that I think it either didn't like booting things from usb3 or I couldn't use some of my sata 2 and 3 ports at same time, something like that. But yeah, try changing the stick to a different usb port. Can't comment on gta5 though, if it isn't crashing in any other game sounds like an issue with the gta5 not liking something.
The problem with booting USB2 sticks is part of the Z170 design. EHCI support got dropped. Google and your MoBos handbook are your friend. Also try different ports. (Would elaborate more if I could right now.) To make WindowsPE 6.1 run properly I needed to add USB3 XHCI drivers from Intel, even on a USB2 port. Concerning GTA: the game is just a stupid cunt. EDIT: Try this: go into your bios before you boot to linux from USB and set secure boot to "Other" normally it should be on "Windows UEFI" no matter if you boot your windows in UEFI mode or not.
Oh yeah, I forgot about the xHCI shit. Tried booting with settings changed to "other" and fast boot off, but it just hangs after a few seconds. Guess that means no clean install of Win 7 for me? Maybe I still have my Win 7 DVD somewhere.
You can press F6 and load drivers from your motherboards driver CD before the actuall install, just like back in XP. RTFM of your Mobo ove: Or, just burn whatever you want to install on a CD. (I know how stupid that sounds)
Me, it was either burn a cd or use a floppy. That laptop I was fiddling with from 97' didn't have fancy things like usb. Burning cds is nice when I want to play something on playstation too.
Remember when back in the day your OS did not have native support for SATA? Now Windows 7 has no native support for XHCI (USB3) and the latest mainboards dropped EHCI support. ove:
There's software out there that lets you boot from USB on older machines - heck, you can even put it on a floppy disk. Can't say how successful it is, just saw it in passing one day. Plop is its name I think?
I don't have it next to me, but I think it was a PC-9300 from sharp. It had a intel pentium P54C, which ran at 150 mhz. I was using to learn about c programming and to read guitar tabs, it did fairly well to be honest. Was a nice thing that my dad trash picked, it's amazing to see things that cost a couple thousand dollars be utterly worthless so fast.
Plop it is. I regularly need that to boot USB-Sticks in VMware. I'm not sure you are getting my point though. The problems Windows 7 has in 2015 are just like the problems XP had in 2003. Just this time not just Windows has a problem, but all OSes that require EHCI at boottime I'm also not sure if plop can fix missing EHCI support.
burn a linux cd that loads the usb drivers and then boots the usb2? I do it for one of my boot USB's since I know a few MB's that didn't like booting off usb sticks.
Needs moar stock v. overclocked frame time online game benchmarking with a realistic GPU at realistic settings plox. Usually I spend my weekends encrypting & unencrypting data, but occasionally I use my machine to play games.