Well, it seems to work.....about as well as the stuff Intel supplied, which does actually spread out into quite a neat circle of powdered metal once the heatsink is fastened down. The LM grease might be a degree or two better under load, but there's not much in it.
I'm not sure whether I can trust Asus Probe, but the temperature behaviour of the CPU is weird- it'll be idling at about 33-34C, only 3-4 degrees above the motherboard's recorded case temp- and then within 5 seconds of starting P95 on both cores the reported temp has jumped 15C or more to 50C; over the next couple of minutes it edges up towards 60C. Then as soon as I stop P95 it'll just as suddenly lose the temp again. I've never seen such dramatic swings in temperature before. This suggests one of two things to me- a) that the stock heatsink is drastically undersized for the job, or b) that the IHS isn't making very good contact with the core, causing a large delta between the core temp and the heatsink temp.
If it's a) then obviously the solution is to do what I should have done in the first place- buy a better cooler. What do people recommend? I've had good luck with Thermalright in the past, still using an SLK-800 on the Athlon XP that this new computer is replacing
. I'll spend £20-30 depending on what I can get for the money.
If it's b) then I guess I'll have to back off my overclock
. It's annoying, because the CPU will prime for a couple of minutes at 3.6GHz if I give it 1.35V, before it overheats and reboots.
Well the computer isn't 100% stable, it'll run P95 for anywhere between 20 minutes and a few hours without throwing up any errors but then it'll reboot with no warning. It could be the memory I suppose, though it's rated at DDR2-1066 at 2.1V, and I'm running it at under DDR2-1000 (with the stock timings).
Have a read of the article I linked- water is an excellent thermal conductor until it all evaporates away
.
Mods I'm aware that this is now in completely the wrong place, please move it for me, cheers
.