Direct heatpipe flaws, cm 212 what should we do?

Hello everyone, I am not looking for an exact answer but rather your opinions on this. It has been proven in the benchmarks that the direct heatpipes make for better cooling. But as i looked at the bottom of my cooler master 212 I see something, there are grooves like a ditch where each heatpipe meets the metal block (on the bottom). This must make for a lot of air and therefor much less efficient right? Should we use our trusty thermal paste and line these grooves? Am I missing something here? Is this what its supposed to be like? What would you do?

I don't have the 212. I have the sunbeamtech ccf. It is very similar to the 212 in that it has those heatpipe grooves.

I used the spread method to apply a good coat of thermal onto the heatsink making sure to cover those grooved areas. Then I just used grain of rice size thermal on the cpu and smashed it with the heatsink. I get 28celsius idle and 55c prime 95 so I'm happy. 955black edition btw.

Hold on, Frostytech.com had something different to say about those grooves...

"The Cooler master Hyper 212 Plus heat sink has a pressed base with a surface roughness of approximately ~32 microinches. The base is flat in both axis. The creases between the copper heatpipes and aluminum form channels which help to evacuate excess thermal compound."

I may have to agree with that for a few reasons;
1) the pipes are about 80+% of the contact surface(coper will more than pull its weight) aluminum is maybe 15% leaving maybe 5% to take in excess paste(there is always excess)
2) being able to squeeze out to the center will allow a thinner & more uniform film thickness (better heat transfer)
3) I uses a lower CFM fan(15cfm lower)and even with the grooves it performed very close to the same level a the sunbeam which has not grooves (imagine if the fans were the same)

4)maybe it will keep the edges of your CPU die cleaner lol

FWW my 92mm sunbeam CCF is smooth and grooveless exept for the very corners where the cpu doesn't touch anyway.

Well, it is still one of the better ones, so it can't hurt too much. However, I don't think filling them is the critical part as much as perfectly applying the paste to the heatpipes, as they are what is really whisking the heat away. The method of filling the ridges does that.