Custom 6800 Ram Heatsink Design

I just read Myzhis post about modding his Maze4 GPU to fit on a 6800. Im going to do the same thing but im going to make a 1 peice RAM heatsink (kind of like nvidias referance design).

I noticed on the referance design, they seem to use small columns and not fins. They also have a heatpipe attached. Do you think the heatpipe really helps that much??

I plan to make this out of aluminum and follow the size and shape of the referance Ram heatsink. You think this is a good design for the fins? If i covered the entire ram heatsink with these columns, will it be sufficient to cool a 6800 GT's DDR3 memory?

Liquid_Cooled said:

I noticed on the referance design, they seem to use small columns and not fins.

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Yes moslty like Swiftech heatsinks BTW

Liquid_Cooled said:

They also have a heatpipe attached. Do you think the heatpipe really helps that much??

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I don't think so. If you look closely at the stock RAM sink there are 2 RAM chips that have no "pins" over them, i think the heatpipe is only there to transfer their heat to the rest of the heatsink.
If you cover everything there's no need for it.

Liquid_Cooled said:

I plan to make this out of aluminum and follow the size and shape of the referance Ram heatsink. You think this is a good design for the fins?

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Well you could try to calculate a total, surface area, and compare it to a similar "straight fin" design. The more surface area the better, BUT this is passive cooling, and there are other factors to consider.. Like fin spacing for instance (there's a minimum fin spacing to get efficient passive cooling), or card orientation (conventional ATX, desktop, or BTX ?) as fins looking down will behave differently from fins looking up and from fin looking sideways...

Liquid_Cooled said:

If i covered the entire ram heatsink with these columns, will it be sufficient to cool a 6800 GT's DDR3 memory?

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Good question, some ppl say DDR3 doesnt get any hot but i doubt that especially @ 1.1-1.2 GHz and heavy rendering job... Or else NVidia engineers wouldn't have bothered with a RAM sink.