Beej wroteWell you should put some mx4 and the pads above them and put the sinks over them...
Forget furmark my friend, i can do furmark till tomorrow and have no crash, but when i run some games its artifacts. Furmark is just to test max power draw of the gpu and max temp, not to bnch or make sure its stable.
About the 460, if you have a good airflow in your cse you should be able to hit 850+ mhz easily, but be carful evga's design are known to run hot and are noisy :S...
As far as I know, using both the pads and paste together causes inefficient heat transfer. Its the same as when it is recommended that you fully remove any thermal paste residue before applying new thermal paste. And you're right, furmark is only good for power draw and max temps. OCCT is a bulletproof test for stability, however. If a card can run OCCT for that 1hr, then it can do anything. I use OCCT for checking card stability for folding. In some cases, it raises temperatures as much as furmark. However, in my experience, having too high of a stock voltage on my GTX 260 (1.125V) seemed to cause furmark to crash the system with a solid color screen, while OCCT passed. Lowering the voltage to 1.06V seemed to allow the card to pass furmark.
Sometimes, OCCT gives errors with an OCed card straight from the factory. You then have to lower the clocks (basically underclock) and approach stock settings to keep the card stable. And you know it's not a temperature issue when a card is OCCT stable at 86C on underclocked settings, except if VRMs are overheating, which is quite difficult since some can take up to 140C (!) on the VRMs before becoming unstable.
