I was VERY Careful when putting the HSF on. My theory is that there is a lack of sealant around the die and it didn't support the core properly. He's based in Adelaide, Australia if anyone would be kind enough to supply him with another Duron. Jai's Duron not booting, I think what Jai said about not being an adequate amount of sealant to be correct. Jai now uses a mod'ed S370 Orb.
All signs seem to say yes.
I'm guessing there are similar Duron's floating around Australia, and Jai and Joe were unlucky enough to get these Duron with the poor sealant around the core. Since we don't have a retail or OEM Duron unit here to test we cannot say whether or not AMD includes a list of recommend cooling solutions on print, if they didn't there is nothing stopping Jai and Joe from getting their CPU's replaced because they were not made aware of what can happen. As mentioned in Insane Hardware's Forum there are various different ways to stop this cracking from happening, the idea about Thermal plates seem like a valid idea to protect the Duron's core. The fact remains people, the brand new AMD Duron CPU's are being ruined by various different HSF's. In this article we did not set out to abuse AMD, I think AMD are a excellent company and will only improve with CPU's like the low-cost, high performance Duron.