Thermal paste application and a mobo question

[magitek]

I'm currently building a new pc, and I have installed the following (so far):

Biostar nForce4SLI mobo
AMD64 X2 4800+
4GB Corsair XMS DDR RAM
500GB Maxtor SATA2 HDD x2
LiteOn DVD burner

I scraped off the stock goo on the bottom of the AMD heatsink, and added about a BB's worth of arctic silver 5 to the chip's heat spreader. I made sure to squish the heatsink around slightly to get better coverage. My question is this: is there any software method of figuring out whether or not I did this properly? I can imagine using a cpu-only benchmark and then comparing to others, but I'd like recommendations on what software to use, if any.

Also, with the components above installed, I should be getting beeps from my mobo when I turn it on (indicating there's no vid card), but I'm not. I can hear the HDD spin up, the ram activity lights go on, and keyboard lights work properly. Maybe I just need to wait longer for the machine to count the ram? If I had a pci-e vid card to test it with, I could just plug in a monitor and find out, but I don't have one yet (it's on order). I'm just a bit worried that the lack of beeping might be a symptom of something being very wrong.

 

[pwnage]

while a bb's worth of artic silver is fine, use a bit more. you want good even coverage on the proc and heatsink. as far as i know there are no software ways of telling if you have the proper amount of TP on you proc and HS.

Do you have a speacker connected to the motherboard?
Does your mobo have built in video?

if you have built in video then you should just get one beep. if you dont you should get a beep error saying you need one.

also with out a monitor you kinda screwed any way. wait until it gets in then try and figure out whats wrong.

 

[magitek]

I just assumed that the mobo had its own speaker for beeps. If not, I guess I'll have to read the manual a bit more carefully.

No built-in video. I should be getting beeps from the mobo due to the lack of video hardware. I also noticed that activity leds on my RAM spaz out for a few seconds when I power-on the machine, then two of them stay at half-activity while the other two go idle.

I just hope the mobo isn't DOA.

 

[linux_0]

If you have an old 32bit 33MHz PCI VGA (NOT to be confused with PCI-Express) card you can use that to boot it up and check to make sure everything is working.

32bit 33MHz PCI = parallel bus

64bit 33 | 66 | 100 | 133 | 266 | 533 MHz PCI-X = parallel bus and is backward compatible with 32bit parallel PCI

PCI-Express = serial bus and is not compatible with PCI or PCI-X