But since your IHS has been pressured (dented?) this is not an option for you. I like Noctua heatsinks, in part because they are only a little convex. One approach is to look at reviews and get the best TR you can find. They are known for their convex contact surfaces, and your CPU has already felt the imprint. The problem comes with your use of a Thermalright heatsink. I'd like to think Noctua would provide similar functionality? I could justify the cost if I consider it will last me a while. I liked that I was able to keep using my Thermalright on a new socket just by buying a $10 bracket. The Noctua NH-D15S looks promising and flexible enough to accommodate most any setup. I might need to finally retire my $40 Ultra-120. I'm using MX-4 as my TIM which seems okay, but honestly didn't perform any better on my 6600K than the old Ceramique that I was using. Though seemingly popular and relatively inexpensive for some of the potential benefits, I don't think delidding is in the cards for me. Looks like I should probably look for a way to cool this thing better. LinX 0.6.5 ran a bit longer before erroring (1m 42s) but did not BSOD the machine. I tried small FFTs with the latest version of Prime95 and BSOD came right away. HWMonitor reports that a few cores have hit 100C and the others are not far behind. Well, though it didn't crash, I am noticing very brief throttling with AIDA64. I'd also expect some instability that I've yet to experience so far, though I have not stress tested for more than an hour at this point. Based on the consensus, my guess is that the chip is actually in the low-mid 90s, but Gigabyte's own utility is sort of a wildcard. Games are the only thing that really stress the system these days, and even HWMonitor doesn't show the cores getting past the mid 70s in that use case, so this is truly the worst case that my chip should see for a sustained period. As the system is (currently) stable while stress testing, I'm inclined to leave it alone. Idle the temps are closer, maybe spread by about 10C.
I'm still rocking my Thermalright Ultra-120 from October of 2007! Trying to figure out what the real temperatures are though. The new chip is running well 5.0GHz with 1.27v on a Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro. I finally upgraded last night from my 3 year old 6600K 4.5GHz to an 8700K.