CPU - Intel Core i7 920 – 4.0ghz
RAM - 6GB (3x2GB) OCZ platinum DDR3 1333mhz
Motherboard - ASUS Rampage III Extreme
Graphics card - XFX HD5870 1024MB
Power Supply - Enermax Revolution 85+ 850W
Cooling - Noctua NH-D14
Hard Drive - Samsung F1 320GB
Western Digital Caviar WD3200AAKS 320GB
Drivers - Catalyst 10.5

Thermal pastes:

Thermalright Chill Factor II
ARCTIC Silver 5
ARCTIC MX-4
ARCTIC MX-3
Coollaboratory Liquid Pro

Program Suite:

Core Temp 0.99.5
LinX stress Test
CPUID HWMonitor

How I Tested:

Each paste was applied as recommended by the manufacturers and was tested over a period of 48 hours to observe if they required any curing time. An initial test was done at stock (2.66GHz) speed and overclocked (4GHz) speed. The idle and load temperatures were measured using coretemp by looking at the minimum temperatures while idling and the maximum temperature after 20 passes of LinX. This was repeated after 48 hours.

Due to varying temperatures, an average temperature was calculated across the CPU cores and the ambient temperature was subtracted to obtain a delta value. This is presented in the graphs.