Japanese website Impress Personal Computer Watch has proven what many have suspected. They discovered that there's thermal paste between the CPU die and the internal heat spreader (IHS) in Intel's Ivy Bridge processors create the heat issues reported widely over the web. It was speculated that TIM may be part of the reason why Ivy Bridge runs hotter, as previous-generation processors used flux-less solder with a higher heat conductivity.

What was discovered is that by replacing the cheap TIM (thermal compound) with other alternatives the website noticed big pretty significant temperature drops.

IPCW compared the stock TIM (thermal grease) with OCZ's Freeze Extreme and Coollaboratory's Liquid Pro while using a Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E as the cooler of choice (a fairly strong heatpipe based  cooler). They then compared all three TIMs at stock 3.5GHz and overclocked at 4.6GHz 1.2v.

The interesting thing here is that at stock clocks and stock TIM the I7 3770K hit 61C while usining OCZ TIM the  temperature already dropped temps to 53C and the Liquid Pro TIM dropped temps down to 50C that's a full 8-11C lower then the stock TIM Intel used on the CPU's IHS. When overclocked to 4.6GHz things get way better, the load temps with stock TIM skyrocketed to 84C, meanwhile the OCZ TIM dropped temps down to 69C with the Liquid Pro dropping temps all the way down to 64C.

That means at full load and overclocked simply replacing the TIM used between the CPU die and IHS showed insane temp drops of 15-20C.