Thermal paste killed my CPU?

[Vinjak]

Specs:
Gigabyte M720-US3 motherboard
Blackpower 550W PSU
AMD Athlon II X3 425 (AMD Phoenom II X4 B25 when unlocked)
Gigabyte GTX 1050 2GB OC Edition
Xilence Cooler
12 GB RAM

So recently I noticed I was having a problem with my CPU temperatures.

3-4 years ago while I was gaming, my CPU was OCed to 3.6 GHz and was running fine, temperature never going above 63C on full load.

After I stopped gaming I saw no point in it being OCed and possibly reducing it's own lifespan, so I reduced the frequency to the stock 2.7GHz.

Now since I was bored I decided to OC it again in order to play games again, so when I wanted to do so, I noticed in BIOS the temperature of the CPU was 57C. That was in the morning, after it was off the whole night. At that point I thought "Oh well, maybe the 4th core was locked for a reason after all" and disabled the 4th core, expecting to see the temperatures go back to normal. But actually nothing changed.

After booting (3 cores, everything stock), the temperatures were the following:
Idle: 59C
Web browsing/Youtube: 75C
Prime95: PC turns off after reaching 80C

Now what scares me is the fact that who knows for how long it was running at these temperatures, I just wasn't aware of them since I noticed nothing because I wasn't playing any games. Ended up just putting a big ass fan in front until I get some thermal paste the next day since it hasn't been changed in 8 years and I thought was probably the cause of the high temperatures.

After removing the heatsink, turns out that the idiot that built my PC just squeezed like 2 whole packages onto the CPU as the thermal paste was all over the place as soon as the heat sink came off. That should teach me to build it myself next time, instead of being lazy and telling the shop to build the PC for me. It was dripping on the sides of the CPU, and it even got down onto the green part of the CPU (board?).

Now after cleaning all that mess up, I applied the new paste I bought, put everything back in it's place and powered it on.
What happens is... nothing?
All the fans are spinning. CPU cooler, PSU, GPU, HDD is working, even the CD drive opens. But I get no image on the monitor. It just stays black and the LED power light on it keeps flashing like when the PC is off (Not like when the cable is unplugged).

Pictures: (Pay attention to the edges. That's where the thermal paste is.)
http://imgur.com/a/GfySb

To answer potential questions:
-Yes, It's aligned correctly.
-Yes, the pin used to secure the CPU is back into place.
-Yes, I was careful not to touch the pins to avoid damage.
-No, I wasn't abusing it while cleaning it, didn't apply any force, was just gently rubbing.

So what now? Time for a new one?

 

[theonerm2]

Too much thermal paste can cause heat issues but it is a rare occurrence because a very excessive amount must be used.

 

[toshibitsu]

As theonerm2 said, it's probably not the thermal paste. I've worked in repair shops for years and seen customers go crazy with thermal paste countless times. Whatever was causing the cpu to overheat has most likely damaged the cpu. The next step from here would be to try another cpu

 

[Vinjak]

I didn't mean that too much thermal paste is causing the overheating.
What I meant was that it's overheating because the paste wasn't changed for 8 years. Doesn't that matter a bit?
The paste got down onto the side of the chip with all those sensitive DONT TOUCH pins when I was removing it. How safe is it to try and clean that side with 96% aethanol?
The only way I can think of without damaging the pins is to just shower it with alcohol and leave it to evaporate, praying to god that I won't kill it.

It really seems unlikely that it was running fine on high temperatures and just died out of nowhere while it wasn't in the socket.

Anyway, nevermind the overheating. What I'm interested in more now is, why won't the PC start?

 

[Karadjgne]

Break out some 2.0-2.75 reading glasses, coffee filters and 75% or better isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol) and clean the cpu up. The coffee filters can be folded into hard edges that won't damage the pins, and are as lint free as possible. Just dampen the filter, do not soak it, it takes a little time, but will come clean eventually. Have patience.

First things first, reset cmos. Often times there's leftover OC settings that were forgotten or changed in bios, that never get reset to defaults, could easily be a current setting (on auto) that doesn't set lower default values because the cpu is still operating in normal parameters, regardless of what you wish the temps were.

You've got multiple factors against you, as said the paste wasn't changed in 8 years, so that means that fan has seen 8 years of use. Could be its simply getting old, and the contacts are worn out/carbon'd etc, so isn't spinning as it should, resulting in higher temps. With lowered settings, fan curves might also be lowered, resulting in high temps. Incorrect bios settings, ineffectual repaste not using enough paste, dirty heatsink. Many reasons.

Pull the cpu back out. You might have been uber careful not to touch the pins, but that's no guarantee that some didn't get bent on reinstall. Common issue with Amd cpus.

 

[Vinjak]

Break out some 2.0-2.75 reading glasses, coffee filters and 75% or better isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol) and clean the cpu up. The coffee filters can be folded into hard edges that won't damage the pins, and are as lint free as possible. Just dampen the filter, do not soak it, it takes a little time, but will come clean eventually. Have patience.

First things first, reset cmos. Often times there's leftover OC settings that were forgotten or changed in bios, that never get reset to defaults, could easily be a current setting (on auto) that doesn't set lower default values because the cpu is still operating in normal parameters, regardless of what you wish the temps were.

You've got multiple factors against you, as said the paste wasn't changed in 8 years, so that means that fan has seen 8 years of use. Could be its simply getting old, and the contacts are worn out/carbon'd etc, so isn't spinning as it should, resulting in higher temps. With lowered settings, fan curves might also be lowered, resulting in high temps. Incorrect bios settings, ineffectual repaste not using enough paste, dirty heatsink. Many reasons.

Pull the cpu back out. You might have been uber careful not to touch the pins, but that's no guarantee that some didn't get bent on reinstall. Common issue with Amd cpus.

Works after cleaning it. Thanks for that! But now PC crashes with all kinds of DIFFERENT blue screens. Sometimes they don't even have a name. Crashing happens each 30 minutes on average. Sometimes less, sometimes more.

IRQL not less or equal, memory management, Interrupt exception not handled, bad pool caller, bad pool header, no name BSOD. Those are the some of the errors I'm getting.

On the positive side, the temperatures did drop for around 20C. But prime95 still reaches 80C. Fan spins at 2700 RPM.

 

[Karadjgne]

P95 is going to reach 80 unless you've got a decent cooler. Irq errors are almost always 1 of 2 things. Insufficient vcore or ram, and the other bluescreens can be attributed to those as well. Windows event viewer critical errors will give you some insight. I'd try reseating the ram first, see if that makes a difference. If the ram is running at stock values, it might benefit from either a small bump (next value up or 0.05v) in vram. Same can be said of the cpu, a small bump in SA and vcore.

I'd also run some diagnostics if possible, like the windows ram test, or even memtest 86, get to an escalated prompt (admin) and run sfc /scannow, run a hdd diagnostic etc, anything that can be eliminated as a potential cause. Set windows power settings for performance, make sure your cores are opened, and have 5%-100% usage, dump hibernation etc