Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.
Well, it probably depends on whether they expect the stuff to melt and fill in the gaps.
When you take one large roughly flat surface and put it against another and apply heat, it is easy to end up with a trapped air bubble. I've taken dozens of heatsinks off to discover large portions of the surfaces were not in contact with the proc.
IF, and this is a big IF, they designed it right, the missing areas could possibly allow air to escape before the melted stuff filled in the holes... They use a similar approach when setting some kinds of tiles.
Of course, I might be giving someone a little too much credit really....
IMHO... people put way too much effort into applying thermal grease. A few air bubles are not going to cause your system to crash. Hell.... the average user could run conroe with NO thermal paste and I doubt they would nitice a difference. Trust me on that one... I've done it. I often use a big heat sink (no fan) for testing and there isn't any thermal past on it (gets too messy when testing multiple systems). Squirt a glob of thermal paste on the middle of the IHS and let the pressure of the HSF take care of the rest. Once the grease heats up it'll fill any gaps.