eTeknix.com take a look at what happens to temperatures when you change the TIM underneath the Ivy Bridge IHS

Ivy Bridge offers the best clock per clock performance of any consumer processor to date and exceeds Sandy Bridge by 5 to 15% in performance at equivalent speeds. Yet this revolutionary new architecture from Intel disappointed some enthusiasts, with its high temperatures and inability to clock as high as Sandy Bridge.

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.

We want to offer something quite simple for the enthusiast world to see, a answer to the following question: What happens to temperatures when you change the thermal interface material on an Ivy Bridge processor? We won’t get into our testing methodology right away, because we will dedicate a whole page to that next.

  Ivy Bridge and changing the Thermal Interface Material