Active memory cooling....any suggestions?

I've noticed that my memory is rather warm to the touch (or to say the heatspreaders are warm). I'm interested in knowing how other oc'ers have dealt with hot memory.

Active cooling like the thermaltake memory kits with fans?
Custom mounted 80 mm over the memory slots?
Fan duct to the memory from the side of the case?
Remove the stock heatspreaders and install ramsinks?

-or- Backoff your $@#$% oc, sp00L!!!

Any advice and/or comments are much appreciated.

Memory doesn't really benefit from being cooled down like that. I doubt you'll see a better overclock if you do. The easiest thing would be to mount a fan over it, though.

Like Cam said...you wouldnt be getting any real performance gain from this.

Although, I don't think that cooling anything would ever hurt it. I think that the best way would be to put a 80mm fan over it somehow..maybe cut a slot out of the side door on ur case.

You do not NEED ram cooling though, until you get to 3v Vdimm. Or unless if of course you have Rambus like I do.

Conclusion: You don't need the cooling, but it won't hurt, maybe use a 80mm fan over the RAM, and keep ur current heatspreader...or if you REALLY want to, then buy some Ramsinks and put those on. By the time the RAM dies from use without the cooling, you will have long by then thrown the ram onto the floor because it is obselete.

Do you know how much over case ambient your RAM temp is?

Mine is within 1 or 2 degC so I don't worry about it...yet.

I really didn't like my Thermaltake active memory cooler. It really didn't do to much and also the fan tended to make a rattling noise like it was hitting something(no wires were caught in it either).

I don't have a temp probe at the moment, but I am at 3.2 vdimm now and the ram is the hottest thing in the case when I touch it. If I leave my finger on there for an extended amount of time, it is rather warm. I would guess 5 - 10 degrees hotter than the mobo. I'm not too concerned about gaining a higher oc, but rather if I'm slowly cooking the ram to failure.

I have a box full of 80mm fans and might try mounting one. Thx everyone for the adivce.

-=[bump]=-

sp00L said:

I don't have a temp probe at the moment, but I am at 3.2 vdimm now and the ram is the hottest thing in the case when I touch it. If I leave my finger on there for an extended amount of time, it is rather warm. I would guess 5 - 10 degrees hotter than the mobo. I'm not too concerned about gaining a higher oc, but rather if I'm slowly cooking the ram to failure.

I have a box full of 80mm fans and might try mounting one. Thx everyone for the adivce.

Click to expand...

Holy thread resurrection, Batman!!!

Sp00L... did you ever mount an 80mm fan over your ram??? I'm asking this, because I'm thinking about doing it too. My ram is still running w/in spec and @ stock vdimm, but I seem to have a hotspot behind my drive cages/around the ram. The heatspreaders on my sticks are pretty warm to the touch, like you said, prolly 5° warmer than the ambient case temp. I don't really want to do any cutting, and was wondering if there is a good way of doing this by maybe rigging something up and connecting to the drive cages or something...

Holy thread resurrection indeed!!!!

While I don't know about sp00l, I can relate my experience:

2 sticks of pc2100 that ran @180mhz fsb for 6 months- at 3.5 volts.
An 80mm fan was directly over the ram.

After that time (burnt up mobo, cpu and much of the watercooling system for other reasons. ) I rebuilt the system and was slowly getting back up to speed: @3 volts my ram died.
I had not remounted the fan.

2.9volts is the absolute highest I would run without dedicated cooling for memory. And I use it now at 2.9 myself.......

Wow! Fried ram is no good...

Just out of curiosity... what kind of ram cooling did you have set up???

Whoa! The thread lives!

Well, I got my mushkies back from RMA and they can do 230 @ 2-2-2-5 at 3.0 volts! So, I swapped out the OCZ that needed 3.2. The sticks are now luke warm at the most and I decided against a duct mod. However, I ordered another stock side panel so I could add a second 120 fan to get some air into the upper mobo area (my current 120 was put in too high to add another.)