Well, I had to test this, and the best way I could think of was to well put it in my pc To test this I took off my Alpha from my TBird 1Ghz and cleaned the CPU off with some alcohol. This means the top of the CPU will be nice and clean and will be ready for testing. Then after building the cooler I put a little bit of arctic silver on the bottom and fitted it being more careful than you would guess! I then took it off again to make sure no damaged was made, sounds silly but I needed to check, both the cooler and the cpu were ok. I took it off and polished the bottom with some of my special paper and then cleaned it off