It burns us, my precious

I spotted this review of the new MacBook yesterday over at Ars Technica

The review is mostly positive, but it does have this paragraph:

I then ran two instances of this script in order to peg both processor cores. The system would step the speed of the processor up to 1.833GHz until the processor crossed a threshold of approximately 82°C at which point it would step the processor down to 1.667GHz. When the processor dropped below 80°C it would speed step back up to 1.833GHz and the cycle would continue. As expected, this would cause the system's fans to rev up to their full speed and overall, the machine was very noisy at this point.

82°C! 82 frickin' degrees Centigrade! And it idles at 63°C! Apple's quality control people need a good kick in the pants for allowing the whole thermal paste fiasco in the first place. There is absolutely no need for a modern PC to run that hot. My desktops run at no more than 45°C under heavy load, 33°C at idle. (That's true for the dual 1Ghz PIII and the heavily overclocked AMD64 3000+.)