How to change the thermal interface material of Ivy Bridge CPUs

eTeknix published a guide on how you can change the thermal paste of Intel's Ivy Bridge processor, you can read the article over here. The results are pretty interesting, changing the thermal paste to a higher quality material like Gelic GC Extreme drops the Ivy Bridge i5 3570K's CPU temperature from 36°C to 32°C in load, and from 53°C to 45°C when overclocked to 4.5GHz. However, while these temperature differences are pretty impressive, the process of changing the TIM will void your warranty and it comes with a high risk of damaging your processor.

Ever since the first reviews came out speculation has been thrown back and forwards about whether removing the integrated heat sink (IHS) and changing the thermal interface material (TIM) on Ivy Bridge unlocked “K” processors would result in better temperatures and higher clock speeds. The logics behind this argument stem from the fact that Ivy Bridge is capable of higher clock speeds than Sandy Bridge once temperature can be tamed – as shown by an i7 3770K recently reaching 7.1GHz under LN2. Add to that the fact Ivy Bridge actually produces less heat, due to a lower TDP. Although the lower TDP doesn’t translate into lower temperatures because of the high density of transistors in the architecture that make heat dissipation more troublesome.