Gskill Ram cooling

Ripjaws V 2x8 2400.
Stamped aluminium with sticky thermal tape.
Each stick has one side populated, the other empty.
The tape sticks to the memory bits well, and peels off with reasonable prying.
The tape sticks to the circuit board astonishingly well and unsticking them is not a trivial exercise.

The tape stays on the aluminium.
The contact points are clearly marked on the tape.

Less than half of the memory area had made contact with the tape.

The aluminium has a big 'V' stamped into it, which lifts most of the available tape area out of reach of the memory.
Which introduces an air layer to insulate the memory it touches.

So in its stock configuration half of the memory is insulated from the heatspreader and may be expected to get hotter than if the tape made actual contact.

And it is intended to run that way.

Ripjaws V 2x16 3600.

Same stamped aluminium bits, same thermal tape.

The stick has memory on both sides.
So it was easy to pull both sides apart.
8 per side,a cluster of 4 at each end.

Only the outermost unit on each end made complete contact.
The tape ends halfway down the rectangle contact patch.
the next one in from the ends is right under the stamped edge and they were cut off randomly.
The middle 8 (both sides) Made no contact at all.

The stamped V is cut away on the sides and bottom to insure that any heat that might be transferred to the aluminium cannot get to the aluminium in the middle of the V.


I really like the thermal tape.
If I found out how to get some I'd definitely tape nice flat strips of 2mm Chinese copper.

Even though just peeling the aluminium off should lower temperatures from stock.

I forget who did it, but a site a while back did a review of some RAM sticks from 5 different brands that had "heat spreaders" on them, and then took it off, the RAM ran cooler without the heat spreaders except for one or two that were almost the same. The conclusion was that the thermal transfer of the pads were low enough that the little bit larger surface area of the heat spreader together acted like an insulator. They tested some after market coolers like those from Thermalright and noted a small drop in temps, and only made any real difference when the RAM was highly OCed. The flat strips of copper don't do much, and for $5 you can get fined mini chip HS's that will work much better. However a property positioned fan will do much better for them if you are having temp issues with RAM.

I peeled mine off because they were so needlessly ( I tried to spell gaudy and autospell came up with "gay", I gave up)

My resulting observations seemed like some [H]ard data worthy of being shared where people might care.

I have some 2mm copper sheet on hand so a possible solution for seriously testosterone infused heat SPREADERS to keep temperatures even across all the memory bits should work well.

Not to be a downer but this is how memory manufacturers have done it since the ddr days. Thermal tape combined with their individual logos has been around forever.

So, memory with LEDs on the heatspreader and multilevel wings will be defeated by memory with LEDs, wings and a Turbo.

Huh, whoda thunkit.