I bought an AMD Athlon64x2 CPU last February. It came with a thin film on the heat sink where it makes contact with the processor itself. There was no additional compound to spread on the CPU. All I had to do was to put the CPU into the socket and mount the heat sink. I have had absolutely no heat issues. In fact, this processor runs much cooler than the Athlon XP 1800+ I had last year, and it was installed on its motherboard when I left the store. Qapla'! Lorenzo
