Well, I dont know what a TIM is, but if you're talking about thermal compound I put on Arctic Silver 5, I applied an even layer all throughout the CPU and it wasnt a thick layer at all. Right now my vcore is 1.3v in bios and under full load cpu-z is reporting 1.248v. I dont know why its undervolting, my 12V rail is @ 12.04v and the 5V rail is @ 5.2v. Anyway, my overclock as of right now is 7x350=2.45ghz. I don't really know if it always reported high since i got the motherboard yesterday.