I remember back when not even CPUs had heatsinks: back in the day they sat bare to the world, but as technology and speeds increased eventually they became to the overclocker and then ubiquitous and even required. Next came video card cooling as tweakers tried to force out the last ounce of power from their graphics chips; now even motherboard chipsets have cooling on them to allow for more stability at higher speeds. It therefore comes as no big surprise that Thermaltake has just released heatsinks specially designed for ram: with higher FSB speeds and tighter timings heat is playing a bigger and bigger role in overclocking your system. The Thermaltake Memory Heatsink package comes fully equipped to handle the entire gamut of System memory cooling with solutions for cooling both system ram and video memory.
The ramsink package came with:
2 heat dissipaters
2 clips
2 ramsinks
1 instruction card
1 "Performance Cooled by Thermaltake" metallic case sticker.
A variety of different lengths of thermal tape.
You have the option of installing either both the ramsinks on one piece of memory and a dissipater on the other side, or to mount dissipaters on both sides of the stick and to use the ramsinks somewhere else, like on your video card. The included clips are attached to the memory for a bit of extra pressure and for increased security.
I chose to install the heat dissipater on my ram and the ramsinks on my video card. The installation of the heat dissipater was easy: I used the included thermal tape to attach it onto my memory stick. As my ram is one sided I used only one of the heat dissipaters and I didn't need the clips to attach it on. For memory I have one stick of 128MB Micron ram set on the default timings. My results as measured by my thermal probe were as follows
| Ambient Temperature: | 28.5C |
| Normal Ram temperature: | 42.6C |
| With the Ramheat dissipaters: | 39.2C |
As you can see the heat dissipater reduced my ram's temperature by 3.4 degrees, or by 24% above ambient. Although I have no way to test out the subjective performance because of my motherboard's limited FSB overclocking ability, I would imagine that anyone who is having problems with overclocking their memory would be very interested in the objective results this product has shown.
The Thermal tape included with the product was very strong: after running my computer for a few hours the tape had bonded so strongly that I couldn't pull off the heat dissipater to try out the ramsinks. If you're the kind of person who isn't confident about attaching something permanent to your computer's components beware, however I'm confident that this product will stay solidly attached for the life of your computer.
When I tried out the ramsinks I had saved for my video card I found out that they couldn't fit on my Hercules Prophet2 MX; the video memory has resistors in the way that are just a bit too tall so I was unable to test out the ramsinks. If you are considering buying this package for your video card make sure that your video ram can handle the size of these ramsinks: 21mm x 63mm.
One other point about the heat dissipaters is that they look really, really cool. Although this does nothing to improve the performance of your computer it does help to add to the tweaked out racecar look for which I have a huge soft spot; it you're a case modder this is definitely a must.
A good point I didn't notice at first is that having the memory encased in the heat dissipaters which don't contact any conductive parts of the ram makes me feel safer about handling it; it reduces the chance of shocking your ram with static electricity.
In the end I have a good opinion of this product; If you're into extreme overclocking or case modding this is definitely a product to look into. Good performance and good looks in one versatile package.
Bottom Line
Box Contents
90% -- Gives you lots of choices.
Performance
87% -- Impressive heat reduction
Features
90% -- Heat Reduction, Style and Security all in one package
Value
90% -- A great price for a full cooling solution
Overall Score: 90%
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