^^ For spreading the thermal paste, I put a polythene cover on my hand and went at it with my finger. Believe me, I have used several different techniques in the past and I think this this the best way to go about it for a even coat. The only issue I faced was that the Chill Factor II paste is much more hard and sticky than Arctic MX2 which is pretty easy to spread. In any case I think the paste is working pretty good. I am running 24/7 at 4.5 GHz (Speedstep disabled) and the load temps even when running benchmarks are never hitting 60 deg other than when running Prime 95.
And yeah, Its hard to do cable management in the Stacker 830. In any case, I will be going for Xigmatek Elysium when it hits the Indian shores.
I used the inverted layout this time around as it seemed reduce the cable mess at least a bit. Also this enabled me to fix a Scythe Kaze in the GPU area to provide additional cooling to the cards, especially the master card which is totally sand witched and had little area to get fresh air. With this my GPU temps are pretty good. The Twin Frozr II does a pretty good job, but in my arrangement, the load temps while running 3DMark11 are like 58 deg on the hotter card.
^^ Thanks, As for Xigmatek Elysium, its going to be long 2 month wait. Mediahome will get stocks around the first week of July. Tentative price is 10.5k + shipping.