Temperature reached 99 C i5-750

[mohamads9000]

I just recently built a system with the following:

Ga-p55A-UD3 Motherboard
I5-750 CPU
2 Sticks -4 GB- G Skill 1600 MHz RAM
Corsair 650W HX Power Supply
Antec 902 Case
Nvidia 8400 GS Video Card
WD 1 TB Caviar Black HDD
Windows 7 64-bit OS
CD/DVD Drive

This was my very first build and half the time I feel like I know what I'm doing, the other half I'm wondering what I've broken.

Well last night I was cleaning the wire-mess inside my case, and part of that involved removing my heatsink (I am using the one intel provided for me). I am aware that is one terrible heatsink, but I decided to fix the wire-mess, so I removed old thermral paste, put new on. I then decided while I was at it to overclock my CPU to 3.0 GHz. I had thought that this was not something too extreme at all the heatsink could handle.

Now when I overclocked the first time and ran Prime 95 with CoreTemp the highest temperature I got was 84 C, it did not exceed that at all, most of the time staying around 78-80.

The second time I ran Prime 95 (after I reapplied the thermal paste) I got temperatures of 90+ and one core reached 99 C. I immediately shut off the system and/or program. The computer seemed normal when it hit 99.
My questions are:

Have I caused damage to my CPU?

I am using DYNEX Silver Thermal Compound. Could it be the problem?

Is there anyway to fix what I may have broken?

Why did my temperature rise when I reapplied the compound?

What CPU heatsink would you recommend?

 

[ibemad]

Sounds like your heatsink wasn't clipped on all of the way.

 

[notty22]

Agreed.
Your not the first to do this.
No , you most likely have not damaged your cpu.
They throttle at 102, but I wouldn't go out of my way to test that.
You can usually overclock to 3.5 and flirt with 90's. To be so high, very fast at 3.0
I think a corner of the heat sink did not come through the back side.

 

[mohamads9000]

Best answer selected by mohamads9000.