3d card Ram heatsinks, really not required?

niels007 · Post by **niels007** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 2:47 pm

Hey guys,

I recently got a nice cheap agp 6800GT. While not 'really' noisy compared to most retail cards, it IS too loud.. Now I can mount a 15x12x2,5cm heatsink from Conrad.com with a low speed 120mm nexus aiming at it.

This would be one big heatsink in direct contact with the gpu core. There are only a couple of 'higher' bits on the pcb and I can drill a dent in the heatsink so the heatsink clears all bits. Now it would be possible to use some sort of 'better than air' conducting foam / tape between the heatsink and RAM chips, but of course the heatsink will be pretty warm from the GPU core heat so it might not really do a lot for the ram heatsinks to be in contact with a ~60c heatsink..

SPCR uses a 6800GT and the Condor heatsink test was, I believe, done without ram heatsinks. Who else has experience running ~1000mhz gddr3 without anything attatched to the chips?

/Niels

cmthomson · Post by **cmthomson** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 4:32 pm

I'm running an eVGA 7900 GT KO SC with a Condor and no RAMsinks. The memory gets warm but not hot. The memory is factory overclocked at 790 MHz (1580 MT).

Works like a charm. No artifacts in ATITool.

Tibors · Post by **Tibors** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 4:38 pm

Don't know how relevant it is, but in the case of the Condor cooler the chips are wide open to free air. While from your description it sounds you will have them with less than a mm of stagnant warm air above them.

JazzJackRabbit · Post by **JazzJackRabbit** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 5:52 pm

No ramsinks on 6800gt>ultra here either. Like cmthomson said, memory gets slightly warm, but nowhere near hot. In fact AC5 gpu cooler was significanly hotter than memory right now, so it effectively was heating up the memory...

mr. poopyhead · Post by **mr. poopyhead** » Sat Sep 09, 2006 9:42 pm

seeing as the reference cooler and most aftermarket coolers have thermal pads to conduct heat from the ram chips, i'm thinking that it may be a good idea to cool them... clearly some egghead engineer at nvidia thought it was a novel idea, so who are we to argue? i figure that 10 bucks worth of ramsinks isn't such a huge expense and cannot possibly be bad for the RAM... that's just how i think though...

bsdie · Post by **bsdie** » Sun Sep 10, 2006 1:17 am

There were 6800 cards with a version of the VF700 from gigabyte (I think) that didnt have ram-coolers. I did the same at home with my VF700cu without any issues. Those fans create airflow around the card itself however, and the condor leave them open like Tibors said. My guess is that a minimum of airflow will be enough to cool them properly, even without heatsinks.