are well known for their family of Orbs, and more recently, their Volcano series of CPU heatsinks. They cover everything from CPUs and video cards, and the one thing that most people don't think about, ...memory. In many cases, an unsuccessful overclock may not be the fault of a misbehaving CPU, but it in fact may be your memory.

Other than your hard drive, and various subsystems, your ram is one of the many things that may be bottlenecking your system performance. We need to look no further than Intel's original push towards RAMBUS. Vanilla SDRAM was reaching it's limits in available bandwidth, and a solution was needed to raise the bar to more performance. RDRAM was Intel's solution, and DDR was AMD's.

Although these new standards provided more bandwidth, and extra performance, there are still limitations to how fast they can run. Although we're generally bound by this rule, enthusiasts can gain some performance by overclocking their ram. Even with SDRAM, if you wanted more speed, you had to push it.

How does one go about overclocking ram? Well, it's as easy as upping your FSB (Front Side Bus). If you remember correctly, the original darlings of the overclocking community, the Celeron 300A and the Pentium 3 Coppermine series, could get a much needed kick in the butt by simply upping the FSB by a mere 33MHz. Of course, back then, you needed PC100 or PC133 ram to do it, but you get the idea. Before the new ram standards, manufacturers packaged and marketed PC150 and even PC166 ram. This wasn't new technology, but rather the ram was rated to run as fast as the PCxxx rating.

Whatever the case, like CPUs, the side effects of overclocking are the same. Like CPUs, higher frequencies generated more instability. In some cases, this can be remedied by raising the voltage, but even if you did or didn't, another problem overclockers faced was more heat. I would think that most of you already know this, but just in case you don't, more heat means instability, possible damage to your parts, and eventual degradation of components.

Thus the evolution of aftermarket cooling. Like everything else zipping along, ram could certainly use some cool loving. As far as I know, RAMBUS modules come pre-packaged with ram heatsinks, but most SDRAM and DDR ram do not. Video card ram nowadays have heatsinks, so why not system ram? Themaltake has introduced memory cooling kits to address this issue. They actually have two solutions, passive (just heatsinks), and active (heatsinks and fan). Today, we're going to look at the latter, the Thermaltake Active Memory Cooling Kit.

Specifications

Fan Dimension: 40x40x20 mm
Rated Voltage: 12V
Started Voltage: 7V
Rated Current: 0.11A
Power Input: 1.32W
FAN Speed: 5000±10% R.P.M
Air Pressure: 1.50mm- H2O
Max. Air Flow: 5.1CFM
Noise: 23dBa
Bearing: Type Sleeve Bearing
Lift Time: 30,000 Hours
Connector: 3 Pin

Thermaltake packages everything you need to mount the heatsink kit on your memory. You got the anodized ram sinks, a small fan with a grill, tape to stick the ram sinks on, spring clips, and a 3 to 4 pin adapter. I'm not sure if the tape they provide have any thermal conductivity properties, but you can easily use your favorite thermal epoxy or paste. If you use paste, there are clips to help hold the ram sinks in place.

The Thermaltake Active Memory Cooling Kit is designed for DDR and SDR ram modules. There is only enough in the kit to cover one or two modules, depending on what you have. If your DIMM is double sided, that is, you have ram on both sides, it's only good for one application. If it's single sided, you can put it on two. Either way, you won't have to sweat it too much, as the fan should be able to sufficiently cool down any ram that does not have any heatsinks on it.

The fan is rated at 23dBa. To be honest, I don't hear it at all, since my case fans easily overpower the noise that is generated by the fan. Thermaltake is nice enough to provide a fan grill, since although small, the fan does spin at 5000rpm, which is enough to damage wiring and to hurt your fingers. It doesn't move very much air though, and by placing my hand near the fan, I didn't feel all that much. It's rated at 5.1cfm, and it isn't much, but it should be enough for cooling such a small space.

Installation is a piece of cake, for the most part. Like I said earlier, I'm not sure if the tape helps in cooling, but one thing I am sure of, it's sticky as heck. Once applied, it is not coming off without a fight. I ended up putting my ram sink on crooked, and it took some wrestling to straighten it out. Lesson to you, work in a well lit area, on a flat surface, and not driving a car in rush hour, trying to put this together between stops :P

For those paranoid about efficiency, use a thermal epoxy or paste instead. Pictured below is how it looks when installed. I mounted it on two sticks of Kingston ValueRam for illustration purposes, as it shouldn't be done this way normally. I'm not sure if the angle is clear enough, but the fan is large enough to cover all the DIMM slots.

Testing

The test bed consists of:

AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.75v)
Abit KG7-RAID
Antec SX1030B Case, with only the Enermax power supply fans on
Room temperature is maintained at ~23C/74F

Intel Coppermine 550E@733
Asus P3V4X
InWin Q500 Full Tower, only the power supply fan on
Room temperature is maintained at ~23C/74F

I've decided to test in a few ways, and hopefully, it's enough to give you an idea of how the product works. Heat test demonstrate cooling performance with a 256MB PC2100 Crucial DDR module, with the heatsinks on both sides of the ram. There will be scores with two 256MB PC2100 Kingston ValueRam modules, where the ram is only on one side of both DIMMs (as in the above pic), as well as a single Kingston module setup as the Crucial module. There will be testing with one 256MB PC133 Generic CAS3 SDRAM module, heatsinks on both sides. All temperatures will be at stock speed. To stress the systems, I ran a 2 hour 3D Mark 2001 script that I'm accumulating scores for later reviews. I'm only displaying the load temps, since I don't think that heat is a killer at idle. Nanotherm Epoxy was used for the tests to ensure good contact.

Temperature Tests (In degrees Celcious)

As we can see from the results, the Thermaltake Active Memory Cooling Kit definently lowered the full load temperatures. I'm not going to get into trying to figure out why there were bigger drops in some ram, and less so in others where both ram sinks were used. But, as it should be expected, when only one side of the ram is attached to a heatsink, the cooling is not as efficient.

Ok, I know the real reason you've bothered reading up to this point is how does it help in overclocking. Well, in my opinion, not so much. As stated in my Crucial ram review, I've had a difficult time acheiving any spectacular results. Sadly, this has not changed. I'm still unable to get anything higher than 142FSB. Temps remained steady at under 40C, but no dice.

On the other hand, I managed to two acheivements with my Kingston ValueRam that I wasn't able to do before. The Kingston modules are rated CAS2.5, and when placing just one ram heatsink on both modules, I managed a CAS2 setting. Like the Crucial ram, overclocking was tough here, and the highest FSB possible was 140 before the cooling kit at a CAS2.5 setting. Now, I can get 142FSB, just like the Crucial, and at CAS2. I removed one DIMM, and added both ram sinks on the installed DIMM, and now 143FSB was the limit. It wasn't all rosy though, for to attain a 143FSB, I needed to drop back down to a CAS2.5 rating.

Before any of you get too excited, I want to point out a few things. I did update my BIOS recently, which may account for my Kingston Ram doing CAS2, and/or to hit being able to hit 143FSB.

Final Words

The kit sells for about 15$ online, and although I've had good cooling success, I want to caution against expectations of overclocking madness. Everyone's results will vary, and although I've had some good news in overclocking, it isn't exactly anything that will add an extra 100 points to my memory benchmarking scores.

The reality is, more cooling theoretically helps overclocking, but like CPUs, that really depends on your component that you're trying to overclock. Thermaltake is marketing this as a cooling product, and not an overclocking product, and no, it's not the same thing. If you're already running at insane FSB speeds, and it's stable, you may want to pass on the product. If you got some spare cash, and you've hit a wall with your memory overclocking, the extra cooling with the Thermaltake Active Memory Cooling Kit may be the ticket. If you got a window kit, you definently need this because it looks cool, and you know chicks dig cool.

Thermaltake:

Pros: Cools ram, easy to install, looks great, *may* increase chances of overclocking.

Cons: May not lower temps enough to be helpful in overclocking.

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