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About LinkBacksits interesting G Skill, who have good a pretty godd rep for overclocking etc afaik dont use heatspreaders on their PC4800 RAM?
its interesting G Skill, who have good a pretty godd rep for overclocking etc afaik dont use heatspreaders on their PC4800 RAM?
It depends compleatly on the thermal output of the chips and theres a lot of difference between one type/model/version of chip and another.Originally Posted by YorkieBen
Its not a case of "stick a heatspreader on because it looks nicer" which seems to be what most companys do, but then heatspreaders do help so theres no reson not to have them.
Are you talking about heat speaders or ramsinks now? Head spreaders won't do a great deal for surface area, and could technically insulate the chip (not good) if they are crap!! ramsinks increase the surface area a fair bit, so should help more assuming a decent air flow around them. The extra cooling may not help you get any extra mhz tho, but would help with lifespan of product...
thats assuming i'm thinking of the right things, in the right order.
Nox
Heat spreaders do very little to nothing.
Good ramsinks cna help a bit, but heat spreaders are 99% gimmicks when it cmes to cooling anything.
They will be better than nothing, however crap they are.
Generally passive heatsinks are crap becuase they rely on a large dT between the chip and ambient to work. There are no passive ramsinks that I know of that acctually do much, certianly none capable of keeping my BH-5/TCCD (with a small overclock, 2.9v) below 55°c without a fan.
For gfx its easyer. Ive got a 60mm silent fan and several large chopped up bits of a s7 heatsink to cool my x850xtpe and it works very well (core is w/c so had to take the stock ram cooling off).
Adding a fan of any kind even 1cfm, could half the temps of small chips.
All heatsinks help if they are good, although if you are not pushing your system they are often unnecessary. Many DDR RAM sinks are crap, meaning that they look nice but do more harm than good. Good aluminum sinks properly installed can really keep your RAM humming along for a longer period of time, especially if heavily overclocked.
i noticed ATI cards have ram chips on both sides. they use heatspreaders on the rear side [the side we normally see when installed into the system]. i think the engineers and marketers at ATI feel pretty safe to not have heatsinks on one half of the memory chips in their products. if they were to break down easily after 1~2years, it'll ruin their product reputation just because of a couple of extra bucks saved from not having proper cooling... no?
There are two different kinds of RAM being talked about here - graphics card RAM and system RAM. The heatspreader in question is for system RAM (I also got one.).
For graphics card RAM, I don't doubt that even a heatspreader, if not a heatsink, would help temperatures. Those little chips run very hot (Burnt myself on them once on my Raddy 9800 Pro). Typically, one wouldn't even bother with a heatspreader here, going straight to heatsinks.
System RAM, on the other hand, isn't usually put under that kind of strain. Unless you're running it at upped voltages, both heatspreaders and heatsinks are relatively useless. In this case, they are mostly for show. Of course, I'm sure your system RAM won't mind running 0.5 degrees or so cooler.
If you run DDR400 on an A64 at 270MHz (DDR540) 1T 24/7 (as I do) it's a good idea to get high quality heat spreaders. Heat sinks on the highend ATi's are a must if you are overclocking but if not they don't need it.
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