You can get away with no thermal paste on both Intel's and AMD's chips that have heatspreaders. However, I certainly don't recommend that you do this. I just said that to illustrate the small impact that thermal paste makes. For everyday usage, definitely use some thermal paste just to be safe. The point I was trying to make was that how much you use, and how you apply it is somewhat irrelevant as long as you have an appropriate amount of thermal paste.

As for your temperatures, how are you measuring them?
Also, don't trust reviews that have CPUs topping out at 38 degrees. I call BS on that.

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As an aside, I got my Radeon 4890 yesterday. I took a black heatsink cover and customized it a bit. I haven't installed it in my main system yet though, but it does work as I tested it on another system earlier.