smithereen said:
I'd upgrade to an HD4890 or GTX275 at minimum. 4850X2s are good too.
How about you read the rest of the posts before posting, you useless f*ck.
On the other hand: applying TIM (thermal interface material, aka thermal compound, thermal paste):
edit: the goal of applying TIM is just to ensure contact between the heatsink surface and CPU. Solid-to-solid, or in this case metal-to-metal contact is the best heat conductivity you'll get. But unfortunately, the CPU surface and heatsink surface aren't perfectly smooth and flat, so you'll get little bumps and holes that will have AIR between them, which is the worst at conducting heat (heat conductivity: solid > liquid > air) so in order to prevent not-very-conductive air from filling the gaps between your heatsink and CPU, you use a more conductive TIM, a liquid usually composed of highly conductive (yet not as conductive as pure metal would have been) material.
Whats my point? Use as little as possible to fill the gaps. You want as much metal-to-metal contact as possible, with TIM filling in the gaps: not TIM to be the white cream between your oreo of a heatsink and CPU.
There are currently 3 popular methods that I'm familiar with:
BB (or pea-sized, your call) dot of TIM on the center of the CPU; place heatsink directly on top of TIM to ensure even spread.
line across cores: important to align TIM directly in a line across the cores lengthwise; very important for i7s, since they're aligned as such (whereas the core2quad series have the cores 2x2 as opposed to the i7s 4x1 + cache)
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So after aligning the triangle, you'd draw a thin line of TIM across the cores, and then press down from above straight down with the heatsink.
Thin-layer spread using credit card/razor/finger in a plastic bag or other material: just spread TIM as thin as you can across the CPU; when placing heatsink, make sure to tighten/press on one side and "roll" across the TIM to minimize the risk of air bubbles that reduce your thermal conductivity.
Which method is best? I have no clue. People get conflicting results... each to his own I guess. But the differences between each method are at most 2-3 degrees celsius, which won't be an overclock breaker (hopefully). Although if you combine a 2nd-class heatsink with 2nd class TIM application that might stack to 5-6 degrees of cooling potential that WILL break your overclock... and since the xigmatek Dark Knight is certainly no TRUE or IFX-14, you're going to have to grab every degree you can =).
Also, I'm going to be posting this sort of thing more and more into every person's build: I would recommend grabbing more hard drives (for a RAID 0 + backup) or an SSD in the future. When I say a single SATA hard drive will be the biggest bottleneck in your brand new system, I mean it. Occasionally this can grow to be a bigger problem: hard drive lag, where your actual SYSTEM stutters because your hard drive is under load. Most of the time you'll just get longer load/read/write times, and even that gets annoying sometimes, since you do have an i7 which is capable of an immense amount of work that your hard drive is incapable of following.