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Video Ram Cooling

D

D4RK1C3

Gawd
Joined
Jan 24, 2005
Messages
866
A friend and I are debating on weither or not you need active cooling for ram or if a simple heatsink is enough. So I pose the question to you. Does video card ram need active cooling?
 
There are WC blocks for video cards that cool both the core and the ram. I think this allows for a slightly better memory overclocks, so I guess active cooling does help to a certain extent. I just have some ramsinks on mine. I would guess that ramsinks with a fan blowing on them would be good enough, unless you're going for that last 5mhz overclock.
 
I don't believe so.

You can get a huge waterblock to cover everything, as posted above, but I don't find that necessary since the RAM chips don't generate much heat and they're much more expensive than just a GPU waterblock. Plus, since it's likely to be made entirely of copper, it will be very heavy and put an excess amount of stress on the AGP/PCI board.

I bought tiny copper RAM heatsinks for my eVGA 6800GT when I got my VGA waterblock installed and have had no memory heat issues whatsoever. I don't you'll see much improvement if you actively cool the RAM chips.
 
short answer : no

long answer : yes


It really all depends upon what you are trying to do with it. Most of the time you wont even need ramsinks on your ram to keep them cool. However under certain circumstances, or if you are trying to get that extra few mhz on your overclock active cooling helps.
 
best case scenario is gpu block and ramsinks. the coolers that cool everything dont really help, and result in a higher gpu temp. if theres any airflow in your case at all, this will work best. the new swiftech mc14 ramsinks looked promising, but the thermal tape they use is garbage. either mix soem thermal epoxy and paste to make a semi-permenent bond, or perhaps try the ocz sinks, they may have better tape. i've had to hot glue 2 of my sinks into place because the tackiness let go :mad: (hot glue around the sink and board, not directly between the sink and memory :p )
 
It is highly dependent on the video card you have. FI the ATi 9800 series cards memory got hotter than a pistol when you started cranking up the OC or juicing it. This is not so true of the 6800 GPU's and the 7800's to even a lesser extent. However, if you are going silent it does make sense. BTW, not all combo coolers are made out of copper. Koolance, Aqua Computer, and Innovatek among others utilize aluminum blocks. The Aqua Computer combo coolers are unique in that it has a floating GPU sink so there is no memory to GPU height mismatch common in other designs.
 
i use the Koolance aluminum heatsinks on all my VGA cards and it is more than enough. my memory is sitting at 1010 right now on my 6800 and the sinks are barely even warm to the touch. i do however reccomend taking the tape off of any ramsink and replacing it with arctic silver epoxy. no frag tape can compare to true thermal epoxy. plus it sure does suck to get to a lan and hear a couple ram sinks rattling around in the case after the car ride over. i also have used them on a 9700pro, a 9800xt, a Ti4200,4400,and a pair of 4600's as well as put them on my buddies 7800GT. only the 9x00's got warm and they were still not HOT. just gotta have a bit of airflow, not much at all but some. :cool:
 
Top Nurse said:
The Aqua Computer combo coolers are unique in that it has a floating GPU sink so there is no memory to GPU height mismatch common in other designs.
Click to expand...
not quite... Koolance uses floating GPU blocks on their designs. for longer too.
 
Ctrl_Alt_Delete said:
not quite... Koolance uses floating GPU blocks on their designs. for longer too.
Click to expand...

Don't think so... Koolance uses a Hydrapak on their memory for their GPU coolers, BUT and it is a big but as they only use the hydrapak on the back side of the card for the ram. The rest of the cooler has memory to GPU mismatches. Here is a pic of the AC with a floating GPU cooler.




aquagrafx-6800-bm-sm.gif





The red button actually floats in the block and automatically adjusts to the memory.






Here is the Koolance unit:



vid-nv2-l06_02.jpg
 
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