Athlon 64 cooling and FSB question

The parts for a system I am building should be arriving tomorrow. I just want to ask a few things because I have never worked with the athlon 64 before. First of all, the processor I ordered is the 3000+ I will be using the retail heatsink with the processor but I also ordered some arctic silver 5. I read somewhere that the athlon 64 heatsinks still come with a thermal pad. Is it safe to remove this pad and apply the arctic silver 5 instead?

As for the FSB, I guess I just don't understand what they've done to it. I would really like to though so that I know what to do with the fsb of the motherboard/ram. I'm sure there's an article somewhere that explains it but I haven't been able to find one. Is the fsb set by the motherboard completely independant of the cpu now? Is there even a fsb that I can set....the motherboard i ordered is the Asus K8V deluxe.

I'd appreciate any input, thanks.

ok, i was wondering about the thermal pad because although i've applied thermal paste with many xp processors I just wanted to double check that I could do the same on the 64.

So you're saying the FSB is now only affects the cpu without affecting the memory. If this is true how are you able to change the memory speed? Is the memory has to communicate with the cpu and motherboard at some speed. Is it automatically chosen to be synchronous with the cpu or what?