What’s in the Box -
MAINGEAR sent us a kit for both the 1155/6 socket and the 2011 socket. Each kit contains the same thing, with the exception of the actual thermal interface material. Once you open up the plastic clamshell you will see that MAINGEAR thought of pretty much everything, including a well written three-page instruction manual (when was the last time you saw an instruction manual for thermal paste?).

You also get four lint free “clean room” cloths, a pair of powder free rubber gloves MAINGEAR’s T1000 cleaning solution (that stuff is amazing, it even cleaned the lettering right off of the CPU socket!), and two of what MAINGEAR calls ETI (Engineered Thermal Interface).

The ETIs are what is the most interesting. As you can see the material is built up along the “top” edge of the plate. This design is what will allow it to flow across the CPU (if applied right) and fill in all of the holes and lines that might otherwise hold air and prevent optimal thermal transfer.

What is the ETI -
Although we do not know exactly what the alloy is that MAINGEAR is using (yes we asked them, but they were not telling) we are told that there are several that could fit the bill. Still even without the exact formula we can tell you what it does. MAINGEAR calls the T1000 a phase changing thermal interface material and it is. When the T1000 is exposed to heat it becomes semi-liquid (also called plastic). In this state (and if the proper pressure is applied) the T1000 will flow across the surface of the CPU and be forces into all defects in the surface of both the CPU heat spreader and the cooling head of your heatsink or water block. This will create optimal contact between the CPU and the cooler all with almost zero curing time.

With traditional thermal paste (even our favorite Ceramique) there are chances for imperfect application and also the chance for the paste to spread unevenly across the surface of the CPU and the Cooler. Also because it is not a liquid, it does not flow the same way across both surfaces. Instead it tends to clot and lump. This more than anything else can create problems in thermal transfer (it is also why you see people spread thermal paste with a credit card or similar. They are attempting to get the best distribution of past across the surface of the CPU.

Installation -
You can check out our video on how to install the T1000 ETI below; it is something of a process, but if you want the best results we recommend you follow the directions closely. It is very important to remember that you need to expose the T1000 to some serious heat to make sure if flows over the CPU. During this time you will want to continue to tighten the side of your cooler along the “thick” side of the ETI. This will force the T1000 material to flow over the rest of the CPU properly.

   

On the off chance that you get an improper flow all is not lost. Unless the T100 material slid off the surface of the CPU or managed to leak out from under your cooler you can always attempt a reflow. To do this simply put the material under high heat (say by running WinPrime95) and see if you can tighten down your cooler any more on the “thick” side. If you can the material did not completely flow across the CPU surface, if not you could still see an improvement in your temps as the first flow might not have completed properly.

Performance -
Our system specs are show here:

Our in lab tests are listed below;
3DMark 11 -
3DMark 11 is the other Futuremark test that we run on our motherboards. This test simulates the typical tasks that a GPU (and system) would have to perform to provide you with a good gaming experience. It is based on the DX9, DX10 and DX11 engines but can only be installed on Windows Vista or later. The suite of tests covers DX9, DX10, and of course DX11 rendering; it also covers AI computations and physics. That’s right I said Physics the latest version of 3DMark uses a Havok physics engine. This removes the advantage that nVidia had with 3DMark Vantage.

As you can clearly see we averaged about a 4c reduction in temperature using the exact same settings. This is impressive for a thermal compound to make this much of a difference.

HyperPi 0.99b -
HyperPi is a front end application that allows you to easily run multiple instances of the SuperPi application. SuperPi, for those that are not familiar with it, is an application that measures the time it takes to calculate the number Pi out to as many as 32 million places. This calculation is then checked and run multiple times (up to 24 for a 32M run).  This test stresses the CPU, Memory and HDD as data is handed off between the three. If there is a weak link, HyperPi will show it. For our testing we run the 32M test on as many cores (and threads) as the CPU has available.  The slowest CPU time is then recorded.

Once again we are seeing similar results in our HyperPi runs. Here we actually expected to see a smaller difference but the EPIC T1000 was up to the load.

Lightwave 3D 9.6 x64 -
Lightwave is another industry standard application for 3D animation and rendering. It has a large tool base and the rendering engine is highly threaded (when using the right render model). This application is also capable of expanding to 4k resolutions as well as ray tracing for rending the light sources. For our testing we use frame 470 of the Pinball scene found in the LW 9 Content folder.  This uses the newer perspective camera that is better suited to a multi-CPU/Core environment. This camera style also uses ray tracing and a much improved anti-aliasing method. Settings are shown below in the attached screen shot.  

Again, all we can really say here is wow… to reduce the temperatures by 4c almost across the board is something that we just did not expect.

Final Thoughts -
The EPIC T1000 when combined with the EPIC 180 is a potent combination. We found that it gave us quite a boost in terms of stability and performance. After seeing the reduction we decided to push this Core i7 3960 and see what we could get. Our highest clock to date on this CPU has been 4.7GHz on the same P9X79 Deluxe that we are using here.


This time we were able to hit an all-time high of 4.9GHz with a voltage of 1.5v. Before this we were not able to run 1.5v into the CPU. Every time we tried we had a BSDO right after the login screen. We have always had to use 1.475v which has prevented us from hitting 4.8 and higher. We will say that our 4.9GHz OC was not completely stable, but with some tinkering we bet it will be.

Check out our final thought video below;


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