[northwind]

As an experiment, I just replaced the standard adhesive heat transfer pad on my graphics card with a dab of arctic silver thermal compound... And immediately, before it's even slightly cured, it's shed 6 degrees under load. That's ridiculous! I mean, obviously I'm pleased with the result, but I'm also pretty annoyed that the card shipped so badly set up. (It's a Galaxy 7900GT with a Zalman ZF700 factory fitted, incidentally)

That's probably not even the best result possible, there's way more compound on there than it needs I think.

Anyway. My point (if I have one, it's not clear) is that there's quite possibly a ton of heat reduction available even with stock coolers/factory fit upgrades, just with a tiny bit of effort and expense. Probably even more worth doing on a recent Intel processor with the poor integrated heat sink surface...