Thermaltake's Memory Cooling
Kit. If heat is what's holding back your system or video card memory, this
kit aims to solve the problem. It costs RM60.00.
This is what you get in the
kit. Two flat RAM module heat sinks and clips to match, two spiky heat sinks
suitable for cooling about half of the RAM chips on the average video card,
double-sided thermal tape for attaching the sinks to the RAM, and a little
badge so you can tell the world you're "Performance Cooled by Thermaltake".
Apply the heat spreaders to
an SDR or DDR memory module and you certainly get a butch high-tech looking
piece of memory. And, practically, the spreaders take up little space, which
means you can still use any other memory slots on either side of the Performance
Cooled by Thermaltake module.
Which is not something you can
say for a memory module with the other two coolers on it. They're not made
for use on RAM modules; they're made for use on video cards. But they fit
one side of a memory module perfectly well. With two kits, you could do
both sides of a double-sided module, and make it impossible to install any
more RAM on either side of the thing.
The important thing to figure
out before you start sticking anodised aluminium on all of your RAM is whether,
even in theory, it needs it. I'll assume for the moment that you're not
just into tricking your computer out with decorative shiny useless things,
and actually want better performance.
The power that ordinary DIMMs
(Dual Inline Memory Modules) in a modern PC consume, and the heat they therefore
emit, depends on what you're doing with them. The exact value can be hard
to quantify.
Current RAM technologies all
use what's known as "partial array activation" to minimise their power consumption.
This essentially means that the whole module doesn't get powered up for
an access operation if it doesn't have to.
For each individual chip on
a RAM module, full continuous power for non-stop read and write operations
is maybe 165 milliamps at 3.3 volts, which is 0.545 watts. The current can
spike to much more than that very briefly when the RAM auto-refreshes, but
even when the memory's working very hard indeed, you'd be unlikely to see
more than 165mA per chip.
A 16-chip module like the OCZ
256Mb one, therefore, can draw something like 2.64 amps at 3.3 volts, if
you're really flogging it to death. That's more than eight and a half watts,
but it's still only a bit more than half a watt per chip. Half a watt over
the area of a RAM chip is not a lot.
In reality, the numbers are
smaller. Memory does not draw its maximum possible power all day long; you
probably can't even make it do it with special RAM-workout software, let
alone any real world load. The RAM is commonly waiting for some other component,
even if a task could otherwise be reading and writing to every chip on every
module all of the time.
Normal power consumption specs
for 256Mb PC133 modules - the specs that are used when designing the RAM
power supply capabilities of motherboards, for instance - are more like
about five watts per 256Mb module. Less than a third of a watt per chip.
Run the RAM faster, or at a
higher voltage, and the power consumption will rise. But even 166MHz is
only 25% higher than 133MHz, and the OCZ module, like other high quality
SDR RAM, doesn't need a voltage boost to handle the higher speed. So it
ought to still be well within the usual heat specs.
