If I were a manufacturer of heatsinks, I'd put the worst thermal compound I could find on the heatsinks I planned to sell. That way, I could make the product I sold look as bad as possible, and I'd be able to throw my customers business the way of my competitors. Also, if my competitors helped by using the lousiest thermal material they could, then we could all throw a lot of business to Arctic Silver. After all, what are friends for. Let's all ponder this together. Or course all of the manufacturers of HSFs could have stock in Arctic Silver, that would mean that there's kickbacks involved, and it really is a conspiracy. I don't think it makes any more or less sense than anything else in this thread, but what the heck, let's just flog it some more.
If you have nothing better to do with your lives, then by all means, sit around and benchmark heat sink compounds all day. You'll probably find that AS might be a degree or so cooler. It's probably more productive than this thread. I doubt that a degree or so of difference makes any real degree of difference, If it does, then you're abusing your equipment in the first place, running it way past spec.
The bottom line here is that most of the benchmarking programs tell fairy tales, most of the hardware sensors are never anywhere near correct, who knows exactly what's going.
I say Intel knows as much about heat sinks for their CPUs as anyone of us, so why should I spend money and go out of my way to remove their compound if I'm not going to abuse the machine by overclocking. Ditto for Cooler Master and whichever other reputable suppliers are selling HSFs with thermal material preapplied. I'm guessing that that works in reverse as well. Ergo, if you buy a crappy heatsink, I'll probably have lousy compound preapplied. But then why go out of you way to buy a crappy HSF? So you can go out of your way to buy thermal compound of course.
If you had gone to the Arctic Silver instructions page that I linked, you'd find that they suggest putting a blob of thermal compound on the center of the CPU (single core), then let the tension of the heatsink spread it out. Gosh, I don't think too many people would trust that method. Yet, they still should know more than we do, or should they? Not only that, but Arctic Silver is revered, even with the silly instructions.
I've had my rant, not I'm going back to Newegg a read some Intel processor reviews, probably written back a bunch of clumsy crackheads. They know all about everything computer, but they're not capable of locking four little push pins. Maybe they'll have some advice about thermal compound. No, I take that back, they'll know everything there is to know about thermal compound.
When I run Prime 95 on my E2140 overclocked to 3.4Ghz for three days, it overheats! Gee, It must be the thermal compound.
