I had to buy some ram today, which by the way was annoying all by itself because I already have ram, just my board doesn’t support it.
So ok, I’ll just order some ram from best buy and pick it up in the morning.
Great.
Except I couldn’t… easily… find any ram without heatspreaders. Now, maybe at 3ghz your memory would want a cooler of some sort, but… doesn’t nand like to get hot? Or are kits that have heatspreaders likely fire hazards without cooling of some sort?
Also, is it a bad idea to take the spreaders off my new ram so I just have plain ol’ black ram that doesn’t look dumb or will it, as mentioned earlier, catch on fire?
DRAM chips are a different beast from NAND. NAND does work better with more heat to a degree, as it lowers how much “wear” occurs when writing. The SSD controller on the other hand does not like heat.
You’d have a hard time actually damaging DRAM with heat, the issue with heat is it causes instability. A common “test” for checking if ECC is working is to using a heat gun (using low temp and wide air pattern).
At this point I couldn’t tell you what is actually benefiting from heatsinks and what is lipstick on a pig.
Flash memory likes things a bit warm. RAM doesn’t care (under ‘normal’ circumstances).
Heat sinks on RAM are primarily cosmetic. Tests have been performed (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR-Bup6qbdA) that show heat sinks only providing a 2–3°C benefit under decent loads. That amount of cooling makes no practical difference to performance. It’s also not big enough to make a difference to the lifespan of the onboard electronics.
tl;dr: Heat sinks on RAM are functionally pointless. Remove them if you want. Absolutely nothing bad will happen.
Back in the days of DDR (@2.5V) the power consumption of RAM modules was non-trivial yet no heat sinks were needed. Modern DDR4 only runs @1.2V so they are even cooler nowadays. Unless you are overclocking your RAM to absurd frequencies you can ignore the amount of heat it produces (only a few watts per stick, with higher capacities being more efficient on a W/GB basis).
I understand that DDR5 is going to be (another) 30% more efficient (over DDR4) on the power consumption front. Makes the entire concept of heat sinks quite ludicrous, IMHO.
PS: The vast majority of laptops — even ‘gaming’ laptops — use SO-DIMMs. They don’t have heat sinks. They are crammed into tight spaces with little if any airflow. They work just fine. In a big case with plenty of room and lots of airflow/turbulence from nearby fans you won’t have any problem at all.
I’ve been buying Corsair Vengeance LPX memory for ages now, and have had no problem getting the heat sinks off using either:
an oven preheated to ~70°C
a heat gun set on ‘low’
Yes, the heat sinks are glued on (well, all of mine have been) but the glue is thermoplastic, so you just need to heat it up a little to get it to the point where it softens and the heat sink just peels off (slow and steady with a pair of needle-nose pliers).
I have removed literally dozens of heat sinks over the years and have yet to damage a single module.
That said, I never have any intention to replace the heat sinks — indeed I usually bin them immediately after removal — so I don’t make any effort to keep the heat sinks in pristine condition. I literally grab corners with pliers and curl/peel them off. Not sure if that has anything to do with it, but I thought I’d mention it. Removal ‘technique’ might be a factor in whether or not the modules end up damaged.
With these kind of questions, you simply have to look at the enterprise solutions. If they have heatspreaders or heatsinks, they definitely need them. If they dont have the features you want to analyze its likely for looks.
They do jack besides make your ram taller and less compatible with CPU heatsinks
There might be something to be said about EM shielding though since they’re typically RIGHT next to the 24pin and if that cable is too close it can cause instability
DDR4 ram uses like 1.2-1.3v
It made more sense back in the day of DDR2 when people were craming 1.8-2.1v through them
Enterprises solutions cram 8, sticks together, have more dense modules and more modules period, ECC buffers, ECT, they also have to be mission critical never fail even if the fans die
DDR1 was less sensitive to heat, larger older processes could take more heat, newer stuff is more sensitive to hear, though given how power efficient it is now it doesn’t generate enough heat to affect it, it’s a big problem for gddr6 for 2 reasons, it’s pushing really high speeds so it needs a bit more juice that it would if it’s slower, it’s also millimeters away from a 200+ watt gpu
Thread is full of misinformation. B-Die with tight timings (4000 C15) rapidly begins to throw errors at around 50 C. At that point you either need active cooling, bigger heatsinks, less voltage, or looser timings. At stock frequencies it’s a non-issue. Even when overclocked, B-Die typically doesn’t reach 50 C below 1.45 V. Other memory chips have different characteristics.