Umm yea ... I know that if you bought a retail processor from AMD or Intel ... it has to have thermal paste on it. It may not look like "paste", it's a VERY thin layer (typically grey colored) on AMD's, and it's obviously on the square-shaped area where it comes in contact with the CPU.
But AS5 is better then any stock stuff (I wonder why AMD or Intel just hasn't started using AS5? It's cheap and obviously does the job a lot better)