I double checked - if anything, there was too much paste, I took some off, but yes, it was seated properly, cranked on tight, good contact. Couldn't find my IR gun, but some (very careful) touch tests on the heat pipes also confirms that it's moving a fair amount of heat around.
Also could find my Watts Up (grr, office moves), but did manage to dig out a Kill-a-watt so could run some rough experiments.
I'm running an i7-4790K on a Asus Maximus Impact VII w/ EPU and Speed Step enabled, no OC w/ the Zalman and a Scythe blowing in. Vertical/Horizontal doesn't seem to affect it much. Running w/ no DGPU and case open.
* Idle is at 800Mhz, CPU temp is 42C, wall power is 40-45W (even idle, Win10 runs a crapton of stuff which makes it fluctuate).
So here's the meat of it:
* w/ Turbo on (stock 4.4GHz), as mentioned, we hit 100C and thermal throttling within 25s. Wall power maxes out a 173W, and then subsequently hovers between 150-160W, and sustained speeds of between 4-4.2GHz
* w/ Turbo disabled (stock 4GHz), it runs 100% at 88-92C - high, but fine until I replace it. Now here's the interesting part - even w/ the same VCORE (nothing else changed but the turbo disabled in BIOS), wall power maxes out at 126W while running 100%. That's a 30W difference vs barely higher throttled speeds and almost 50W below when it's running at full-bore at 4.4GHz.
Basically, the Zalman is doing a decent job, and would be fine for 35W or 65W CPUs, but it's still just like 60g of copper. What's surprising is just how much more power the turbo is drawing - far above Intel's published "TDP" numbers. This is without my GTX970 in at all (I'll probably Kill-a-watt it to a separate PS while I wait for proper cables just to test). Anyway, I'll probably just leave turbo disabled, but will also probably end up switching to the Noctua as well (Amazon 1-dayed on Friday).
