Ivy Bridge and changing the Thermal Interface Material

With the IHS removed we then cleaned up the old thermal paste and industrial glue. With all that removed we then reapplied a very fine amount of each thermal paste on top of the Ivy Bridge die. We used the line application method to make sure it was applied evenly both under the IHS and on top of the IHS. Remember too much thermal paste can be as much of a hindrance as too little thermal paste or bad quality thermal paste. For more details on the application of the thermal paste please see the previous page and attached video guide courtesy of WhiteFireDragon.

With each thermal paste applied above and below the IHS we then proceeded with testing the processor at identical stock overclocked settings as we did with the stock IHS configuration. These were:

Stock Clocks: 3.4GHz but Turbo’d up to 3.8GHz under Prime95 Load. The voltage was auto-regulated but held constant at 1.1v

Overclocked: 4.5GHz with no Turbo increase under Prime95 Load. The voltage was auto-regulated but held constant at 1.3v.

In case you didn’t read page 4, you’ll notice we have dropped Antec Formula 6 and Arctic Silver 5 thermal paste from testing due to them having significantly lower performance than our other thermal pastes. Here are our results from testing:

As you can see the Gelid GC Extreme and Noctua NT-H1 thermal pastes fare the best in our testing with the Gelid GC Extreme being the overall winner by 2 degrees. These results are quite a bit lower than those with the IHS left in its stock configuration. Please proceed to the next page to see  “stock IHS vs modified IHS” comparison graphs.