My other fear is that this is the first time I've ever used liquid metal thermal paste, and although I was careful, if it seeped around the edge of the CPU it would very easily be causing a short.
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Yes, I checked against the manual. M2 drive is in the right location. Memory sticks are in A2 and B2, just like it says. SIGH. Gonna go get that PSU checker after breakfast and make sure if that's the problem.
Looked up power requirements for the Ryzen 7 9700x (there's only 2 9000 series CPUs, figured out which one you likely had from the box) and the PSU specs / manual was easy enough to find.
I started lapping CPU heat spreaders and heatsinks back in the days of the single-core Pentium 4. One thing I remember reading was the point that thermal paste (back then, at least) had less thermal resistance than air, but more than direct metal-to-metal contact.
Thus the goal was to have the flattest mating between CPU & heatsink possible and fill the microscopic gaps with the thinnest haze of thermal paste possible.
Now heatsinks come with a mirror finish. You can tell by eye they're perfectly flat, and I figure thermal paste has improved as well.
But all that aside... I suspect if your thermal paste had created a short the motherboard would still light up and show a CPU fault light with its diagnostic LEDs.
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[MW: pdf] https://download-2.msi.com/archive/mnu_exe/mb/MAGX870TOMAHAWKWIFI_English.pdf
Looked up power requirements for the Ryzen 7 9700x (there's only 2 9000 series CPUs, figured out which one you likely had from the box) and the PSU specs / manual was easy enough to find.
And I still didn't see anything wrong.
Now heatsinks come with a mirror finish. You can tell by eye they're perfectly flat, and I figure thermal paste has improved as well.