Why does temp affect performance? I mean, I can understand not wanting to cook it but it seems my computer works better now that everything seems to be cooling properly. eg, no more screen locks in games,,, so far.
CPUs get squirrely if their temps are too high. All kinds of funky things happen, including what you mentioned in games.
We have some automatic equipment where I work that gives us fits from time-to-time. It's old school industrial PCs with Pentium IV CPUs running Windows 2000. Lock ups are the order of the day if the cooling fans fail, dust builds up, etc. It's a distribuition center moving lots of cardboard cartons on roller conveyors, so we make a lot of dust.
It especially goes nuts in the summer at some of our facilties located in warmer climes. The thermal design of those PCs was not well thought out, and the original TIM was a crappy two-sided thermal pad that dried up and failed after a couple of years.
I did a fair amount of research and testing of different CPU coolers and the application of thermal interface material, trying to coax a few more degrees of cooling out of those systems. We use the Arctic Silver V TIM for the most part, and their application instructions seem to work the best. I tried your variation of thinly smearing it on a CPU and heatsink, plus others that were similar. None allowed as much heat transfer as did the method shown in the Arctic Silver instructions.
You might read them if you get a chance. I don't know if you used AS, but how their TIM is applied and why it works is interesting reading by itself. Neat stuff.
