You don't need to cover the entire die. Just leave whatever is left on the heatsink Coldplate and on the die alone. Then just use a plastic tool to scrape any that were pressed out during mounting and re-place them onto the middle of the die.
Mount and tighten as usual. Just by having the mounting pressure along with the heat cycles later will be enough to spread them again. My 1 month experience was enough to see that there were no difference in temps between new and reused 7950
I use PTM 7950 for my laptop, an MSI with a 6600m.
With stock MSI paste, the delta between edge and hotspot was as large as 14-16C. With PTM, that hotspot drops to just 10C when overclocked, and as low as 6-8C when playing with locked FPS.
Open my laptop up to clean fans which required moving the entire heatsink, picked PTM from the sides of the die and replaced onto die. Hotspot was still only 10C hotter than edge temps. There was no noticeable drop in performance at all.
Edge temps at ~88w - 80C Hotspot ~88w - 90C
Temps may appear high but keep in mind it's a laptop and it's overclocked.
My guess would be scaling. Off the top of my head and a brief Google search seems to lead to 680m vs 780m using slower 4800mhz and 5600mhz memory.
Which leads me to now think they both scale pretty equally at this RAM transfer speed. However at 6400mhz, the RDNA 3 780M could probably start scaling higher compared to the 680m. Guess we'll never truly know.
I'll start by saying I'm BIASED to AMD
But at the same time, the issues you've listed seems to be specific to Dell/Alienware shitty software. High temps are a trademark of Alienware thin designs. Software (and drivers and AWCC or Dell CC causing driver fk ups) are also their weak point necessitating updates after updates to fix.
Terribly specced display over lower tier options seems to be a cost cutting measure. Which makes me think Dell/Alienware decided to rush this to be first with the hardware. Here's hoping some other OEMs decided to take this up and actually do it right.
I would also be surprised if Adrenaline tuning works on the 7000 series tho. Last I heard was that the 7600 series were locked out. My 6600m and some guys 6700m were also locked but I haven't read about 6800m being locked out yet. We could only do manual tuning via MPT unless we roll drivers back.
Is there a way to say it looks better just because of the higher FPS or just outright looks better because the higher FPS gives more information?
Also, how does this translates to if using locked FPS? less info to process?