Despite all the smart things it brings, Ivy Bridge has also been a bit warmer than critics and overclockers would have liked, to say the least. A few weeks ago, overclockers discovered an imaginable culprit: a normal thermal paste that sits between the processor matrix and the visual heat sink board from the outside. In contrast, Intel splashed flux-free soldering in this position on its Sandy Bridge processors, which are known to have much higher thermal conductivity. Now, the Japanese site PC Watch has taken the next logical step, replacing the original thermal paste on a Core i7-3770K with a more expensive aftermarket option to see what happens. Thus, inventory clock temperatures dropped 18%, while overclocked temperatures (4GHz to 1. 2V) dropped 23%. Better thermals allowed the chip to cope with higher core voltages and higher core clock speeds and thus provide higher performance. It shows that you can’t take shortcuts, even the 22nm ones, without someone noticing, but it’s possible that Apple just told you so.
