Benefits self-applied thermal grease
 

Most of the heatsinks today come with pre-applied thermal interface material. Would there be a noticeable difference in temperature if I applied my own Arctic silver 5 instead of the pre-applied material ?

2-5°C max. I think. if you can do it; do it. if you didn't do it; not worth the hassle of removing the cooler & doing it

that's in my humble opinion

I wouldn't do it, even if the cooler is not yet installed.

Why
-> You will not notice it when you use your PC.

- overclock will not ingrease, or maybe 10MHz.
- lifetime will ingrease a little bit in theorie, but who cares if you are about to sell it again between this and 5 years (wich is allready a long period when talking about PC's)


If you are getting bad CPU temps, it is advised to reinstal your heatsink. In that case I would stick with AS5, because you will have to clean the heatsink base anyway. Although white goop does the job just fine, and it's not electrical conductive.

I think some review mentioned that TIM with cooler on your profile is very near AS5.


Instead I would recommend changing those in your motherboard.
Asus has put some very crappy "wall putty" under chipset heatsinks of P5W DH.

Maybe with south bridge difference might not be so notable because there's wide area transferring heat but under northbridge heatsink situation is quite horrible: Because of bare die heat transferring area is very small (in class of 10x10mm) and then there's near half millimeter thick padding of that putty between it and heatsink!

Thank you for this tip EsaT. I will see what I can do replacing that stuff with the AS5.