Ram sinks for video cards

[PipeBom]

Do ram heatsinks cool the ram on your video card that much? Are they realy worth buying? Obviously they help keep the card cooler and more stable, but to what degree in overall overclocking?

Also, is it worth buying a Blue Orb for my card? I have an ASUS GeForce2 MX400 Pro ( 32Mb ). It's standard h/f is fairly good, but will a Blue Orb give the card that much more overclockability?

[Silversinksam]

Pipebom,

What kind of card do you have? The VideoCards with DDR get pretty warm and ramsinks can possibly get you a few more MHz's.

A few Ramsink options are:
Radio shack has some ramsinks for 1.79 each

These are nice albeit more expensive
http://www.highspeedpc.com/ramsinks1thumb.jpg
]http://www.highspeedpc.com/cat15.htm


Now the Blue Orb is nice, but check out this Low Profile Heatsink suitable for a Videocard, and at $15 will definitly kick the Blue Orbs @ss

http://www.nexfan.com/images/bu0tnmv6.jpg

http://www.nexfan.com/29/171.htm?315


Now if you want the king of the hill GPU heatsink at $28 clams here it is.

http://www.ocshoot.com/ultra/hot/assy.jpghttp://www.coolerguys.com/cpucool/fcpga.shtml

[el]

great product links and deals

thanks silversinksam!

[The Overclocker]

ram sinks only work with high spead ram (3ns and lower) because above that it is the ram rating that is the problem and not the heat. however on my geforce 2 mx i have huge ramsinks, it makes it look better

[Monaco]

RAM sinks look cool, and more importantly they keep heat generated by RAM from leeching to the GPU or other system components that cannot tolerate heat.

RAM has a maximum operating temperature and a maximum frequency at which it can refresh. Exceed either one and you are out of luck. The trick is to find your RAM's max speed, and then keep it under it's max temperature. A little different from a CPU\GPU core etc.

I know this- it will definately not hurt to attach some RAMsinks!

[Badger]

My asus V8200 has built in temp monitoring for the RAM, the temp with the standard heat-sinks was 33C and the ram was stable up to 590MHzDDR. As an experiment I removed the heat-sinks and the temp then was ......33C, thats wright, no change! Not surprisingly the ram still oveclocked to 590MHz.
The fact that the HS's made no difference is not surprising when you consider the ram temp and case air temp are only around 5C different, therefore very little cooling is possible with any 'passive' heat-sink, only peltier or a chiller of some sort could really cool the ram.
My conclusion; ram-sinks are just for show (at least on my card) but they do look nice!