Do RAM sinks really work?

Rickster · May 23, 2006

I don't think it cools down our RAM. The fins are thick, and all the heat must be contained in the RAM sink and this will make it harder for air to flow through the RAM sinks. And I think the RAM sink is too small to even make it count. And the adhesive inbetween the RAM and the RAMsink probably insulates the heat.

I remember a few years ago people were saying that RAM sinks make the RAM even hotter.

Even with all this said, why do many people use RAM sinks on their graphic cards? Correct me if Im wrong.

synthetic_fenix · May 23, 2006

It helps, Not as much as it could if you had thinner fins. the whole Idea of a heat sink is to give more surface area to the heated area to help radiate the heat away from the part producing the heat.

I plan on using Ram Sinks on my Video card in my sig when i got water cooling next month. I can get my Ram to almost 2 ghz, thats way too hot to not have any type of cooling on them.

twoeyes · May 23, 2006

It helps on video cards where memory actually gets hot, but if you're talking regular DDR system ram which produces hardly any heat then no they dont do squat, but thats pretty common knowlege.

Rickster · May 23, 2006

But how exactly can the ram sinks help even on video cards. Some of the ram sinks look like they have thick bases, and the metal isn't long and big enough to catch cooler air. Although I will use ram chips on my video cards just because everyone says it does help.

synthetic_fenix · May 23, 2006

if you compare a ramsink to a heatsink for a processor, I believe the base same thickness, percentage wise as on a ramsink. Even if the base is thick, it sill adds more surface area for heat to dissipate off of.

Sjaak · May 23, 2006

If you have proper airflow, yes. Else, no.

Cobalt · May 23, 2006

It doesnt really matter how thick it is because all they aim to do is increase surface are. If they got really hot then you would need some air flow over them as well and then you would also need to have thinner fins but the surface area increase of the ICs on their own is more than enough. The adhesive is thermally conductive and acts like a TIM so there are no worries there. Maybe on older RAM sinks the adhesive would have been a poor conductor but that isn't the case now.

I'd rather have them on my video RAM just for peice of mind just as much as anything else.

KillrBuckeye · May 23, 2006

synthetic_fenix said:
the whole Idea of a heat sink is to give more surface area to the heated area to help radiate the heat away from the part producing the heat.

Just a minor technical correction: All heatsinks work through conduction and convection, and not radiation.

Radiation is what you feel on a clear summer day when the sun is shining directly on your skin, or the heat you feel from an open flame that is many feet away. But Rickster, everyone is right about the ramsinks providing additional heat transfer capacity. Regardless of the shape of the heatsink, as long as it is a thermally conductive material (usually copper or aluminum), it will help since there is more surface area (compared to the bare chip surface) over which air can flow and remove heat.

MaxPowers_68 · May 23, 2006

Rickster said:
Do RAM sinks really work?

I sure hope so, lol.

exhausted mule · May 23, 2006

^ that's hilarious.

masakabassist · May 23, 2006

At the moment I am using active RAM cooling. It has only made a difference of about 5MHz increase on the RAM and dropped my case temps by about 2c. I have yet to try passive RAM cooling though.

RangerXLT8 · May 23, 2006

You know ramsinks are working when they are 72c with the laser thermometer. That's 72c of heat off of the BGA chip.

scott d · May 23, 2006

Rickster said:
I remember a few years ago people were saying that RAM sinks make the RAM even hotter.

I think you may be thinking of heatspreaders on DIMMs. Some manufacturers use poor quality or too much thermal tape, so that it actually insulates the heat rather than spreads it. Ram sinks, however, do seem to offer some performance improvement, at least from what I've seen first hand.

nd4spdbh2 · May 23, 2006

MaxPowers_68 said:
I sure hope so, lol.

SOME ONE needs to dust out his chipset cooler...

N e ways im sure ram sinks help... i kno for a fact that the GDDR3 on my 6600gt 900mhz OCd to 1282mhz gets only to about 95*F bare ram no cooling needed. The core on the other hand needs a P4 hs..

maddog39 · May 23, 2006

Well, if you really wanted to, just get an exacto knife and start scraping!

LOL. However, I can say that if you have DDR2 RAM which really does get hot, they produce alot of heat, as well as PCI-E video cards which use GDDR2 or 3 high-speed RAM which gets even warmer than DDR2 sometimes, I believe they are certainly very effective.

[Edit]
Overclocked PC3200 RAM also gets pretty warm.

Rickster · May 23, 2006

hmmm....

QuietIce · May 23, 2006

Older CPU's use the same type heatsink as modern RAM does - it worked to keep those old 486's cool.

At 200 MHz or so they started adding fans ...

Spade · May 23, 2006

hey max, nice plethora of copper 'sinks there on that mobo!
(seriously, nice work)
ever try watercooling the chipset too?
or the gpu?

Fridge · May 24, 2006

The bottom line is, does the chip need cooling? If it gets hot, then by all keans find a way to cool it. The best way is some sort of sink, as modelled on the mobo above. Just use proper thermal paste/adhesive instead of crappy tape stuff that OEMs love so much.

RAM heatspreaders on the other hand are next to useless. I have nothing against the ones that come with RAM, some are quite good looking (I'm thinking the black mushkins, the yellow Ballistix) but they do very very little for cooling, some people even think they insulate the ram.

All in all, no RAM chip should be putting out more heat than a small, quiet fan cant handle, even without sinks of any kind on them.

hitokiri_808 · May 25, 2006

Heatspreaders on ram do squat. I put these on my HyperX instead. Not bad for $6 total. I remember paying around $14 or so for a heatspreader for my first stick of DDR years ago. Waste of money.

Video ram gets pretty hot. I never sinked the ram on my 9500 Pro but it did get mighty hot. My 6800LE has a NV5 on it so I can't really comment on effectiveness of cooling video ram.

If a chip is to hot to leave your finger on, put a heatsink on it. If a heatsink is to hot to leave your finger on, put a fan on it.

Do RAM sinks really work?

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