Thermal paste causing aftermarket HSF to be ineffective?

[theawddone]

I posted another thread in one of the GPU forums with many views and no responses, hopefully this one works out better...

My Core 2 Duo E6700 (yes, I should've gone with the E6600, but I splurged before I had started reading these boards) is running at 45C 'idle' according to CoreTemp, but I have installed a Zalman 9500 on it and was expecting far cooler temperatures. This was my first time installing a heatsink, and the first time I seated it, the fan was in the wrong direction but I didn't realize that until a few hours later when I was double checking I did everything right (despite all the bootup/etc being fine) so I rotated it, but without cleaning/re-applying the thermal paste.

Could this be the reason that I am seeing higher temperatures? I had intended to overclock at least a little bit (not too much because unfortunately I bought this CPU with a bundle with the intel 975x board before the asus/others became available), but I am not too sure if I should push it with a 45C idle temp... My follow-up question would be, is it worth it to go back and clean off the old thermal paste (arctic silver 5 btw) and re-seat the HSF?

Thanks for reading this, would really like to start overclocking.

 

[theawddone]

I couldn't find that program on intel's website, but I did download the latest version of their Desktop Control Center, and this still showed 44C as the idle temp. Is this tempworth cleaning off the arctic silver and re-applying it...? That is the only reason I can think of for the temp being this high (it seems high to me at least, I may be wrong).

 

[theawddone]

Readings from the Intel(R) Desktop Control Center are as follows:
CPU Zone: 43
Zone A: 38
Zone B: 36

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16811156174

Thanks a lot for the help btw, it's appreciated...