custom ramsinks -- how to?

[xsilver]

I was thinking of getting some ramsinks for my ddr ram but they all look so puny and useless

I was thinking of making some of my own with some flat aluminium bars that I have -- they are about 1cm thick -- think of aluminium rulers

the question is, all the ram sinks that I see use "thermal pads" -- is this ABSOLUTLEY nessesary? or can the aluminium be directly beside the ram?

I was thinking of attaching the aluminium bars with bulldog clips or something, not epoxy thanks

 

[iamtrout]

Erm, I don't think your "flat aluminum bars" idea will work that well. All ramsinks have fins and the idea is to increase the surface area for heat to escape the ramsink, as well as create channels for air to flow through to carry away heat. If you just plop a 1cm thick slab of aluminum on your ram, that's going to act more as a heat reservoir than a heatsink. The fact is, those "puny" ramsinks will have more surface area than your aluminum bars.

The point of (T)hermal (I)nterface (M)aterial is to fill in the small gaps between heatsink and ram for better heat transfer. Neither surface is completely flat and smooth to begin with, so not using TIM would make heat transfer less efficient, as there will be a bad interface between the sink and ram.

Bulldog clips?? Uhhh... it's ghetto and creative I guess. Hey, if you can rig up something like that securely and manage to apply even pressure on the sink/RAM and not short out the board/damage/scrape it up, more power to you.

 

[xsilver]

lol -- the ram sinks I was reffering to are those flat bars such as the ones on ocz and kingmax memory --- not the individual ramsinks that you can buy -- those would be good but you would need to use epoxy? or double sided tape?

http://images10.newegg.com/pro...mage/35-110-104-04.JPG

this was what I was talking about being "puny" ....

I really just wanted to know by putting bare aluminium on ram chips is not going to short out anything?
thanks

 

[iamtrout]

Ohhhhhhhh..... I gotcha.

No, bare aluminum on ramsinks will not short out anything. What you're referring to are technically called "heatspreaders" because they are designed to spread out the heat between the individual RAM chips. On a single RAM board, some chips may run hotter than others, and the heatspreader is simply designed to even out the temperature between the chips so that the ones that run hot can have some of their heat transferring to the cooler running chips. Because cooling system RAM is not mission critical to practically anything, the absence of TIM shouldn't effect much. Of course, if you use bulldog clips to hold them in place you might as well use some thermal paste to boot.

But keep in mind that all you're going to be doing is making a glorified heatspreader. To actually cool down the whole RAM stick, you're going to need airflow. Simply slapping on a couple of sticks of metal isn't going to cut it because there's no medium for the heat to be carried away in once it reaches the heatspreaders.

 

[Tiamat]

I make my own custom heatsinks from old pentium slot heatsinks. They are slightly less than an inch in height, and have 9 pins per sq cm. roughly. I had to mill the bottom surface flat and to a polish because it had a horizontal ridge going across. I took these from really old compaqs that my work had in the recycling room.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

For the size of the memory chips on your VGA card or whatever, the commercially available RAMsinks wouldn't be "useless", although they are certainly small.

On my FX5950 AGP card, I wanted to install a Zalman ZM80D-HP. The original ASUS heatsink-fan arrangement had thermal paste and a rather formidable two-plate heatsink with fan and duct. Little raised areas on the heatsink mated up with the vid-RAMs and thermal paste (grease).

Realizing that the original heatsink design had its purpose, I ordered some aluminum RAMsinks from SVC. Some of them had to be milled down with a file before I could fit them between the AGP card and the Zalman heatsink-plates.

If I ever want to remove them, it will be some trouble. I used a two-sided, translucent thermal tape that really does well what it's intended to do -- bonding the components it sticks to. Even so, I think with great patience and care you could use a razor blade to separate your RAMsinks if you ever want to remove them. Just don't let the blade slip while you're working with a VGA card!

The white thermal pads are not reliably adhesive enough, that is, those that I've received before were not sticky enough.

But generally, I use the (SENSUI ?) thermal tape with the idea that I'm not going to remove an item in the very near future. Also, heat tends to make the thermal tape "set". Very sticky stuff, to be sure.

 

[Melectricus]

Bonzaiduck, I had thermal tape on an old video card heatsink, ramcoolers, northbridge and memory spreaders also that I removed.

A trick I read somwhere said to use a hairdryer directly on the sink for about 15 seconds or so and 'gently rotate' and pull to break the bond. It worked every time. Use a rag to grab hold of the sink ( too hot to touch ) I lay a cloth around other components to direct heated air away from other parts. Clean up is another issue tho.. lots of goo-gone and playing and lots of alcohol for cleanup.

I'd absolutely use something thermal between the spreader and chip as everyone has already said.