Ivy Bridge and changing the Thermal Interface Material

Before we perform the risky task of removing the Ivy Bridge i5 3570K IHS, we have to get some baseline results for temperature comparisons. Our stock IHS temperature testing saw us take the 5 previous mentioned thermal pastes (Noctua NT-H1, Antec Formula 6, Antec Formula 7, Gelid GC Extreme and Arctic Silver 5) and use them as normal thermal pastes – so place them on top of the IHS to make contact between the processor and the CPU cooler’s base. We tested all five thermal pastes for the load temperatures they gave at stock clocks and overclocked speeds.

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.

Here are our results:

As you can see at stock clocks there was very little difference in temperatures. This is due to the fact the TDP is quite low so thermal paste doesn’t really have an opportunity to come into effect. You can see that under Prime95 load when overclocked, the thermal pastes started to become further apart. In fact we saw a noticeable drop off in performance of the Arctic Silver 5 and Antec Formula 6. These results were not “one-offs”, we did retest an additional two times and came back with the same results. The Antec Formula 6 was not an unexpected result as the Formula 7 is Antec’s newer thermal paste that replaced the old Formula 6. The Arctic Silver 5 result was very surprising, we think the poor performance could be due to the fact Arctic recommend a 200 hour burn-in before it reaches its maximum efficiency – unfortunately we just didn’t have that kind of time.

We felt it appropriate to drop the Antec Formula 6 and Arctic Silver 5 from the next round of testing as they just didn’t perform well enough to justify the time of applying them again when compared to the other thermal pastes.