The theory of thermal grease

[birthdaymonkey]

I've been doing a lot of tinkering with my cooling setup... Getting my space heater PhII 940 BE overclocked in a SFF case is a constant(ly entertaining) battle.

Anyway, this brings me to my question. Does a better TIM necessarily mean better cooling performance in every situation? Or would it only help in a scenario where the HSF has untapped heat dissipation potential due to suboptimal transfer from the CPU? In the HardOCP roundup where they compare many different TIMs, one of the Shin Etsu compounds resulted in nearly 2*C better performance over the rest of the pack. If I put this stuff on a stock cooler that was running hot, would I see CPU temperature improvements, or would the HSF already be saturated with heat?

 

[BoomerD]

IF the stock cooler is seated correctly, odds are, a quality TIM won't make much (if any) difference. They're usually efficient enough to handle stock clocks, but once you crank up the heat, they start to fall behind pretty quickly.

 

[fffblackmage]

A 2C improvement is hardly worth the trouble. If you want to go that far for improving the cooling, you might as well get a new heatsink.