~My History Lesson~
Heat sinks are not just for the CPU anymore. First they expanded to the Video processor (GPU) and the north bridge on motherboards. Then after Nvidia started pushing their GPU even hotter err.. I mean faster they added a fan to it. Then once they realized that the bottle-neck in the whole video department wasn't the GPU but rather the Ram bandwidth they add faster and faster ram. Once again this raised the speed of their products and also the heat. With the release of the GeForce 2 Pro Nvidia finally had pushed the ram to its limits with out some sort of cooling. Then with the Release of the GeForce 2 Ultra they finally included what many tweeters and performance- minded end users had known and done for some time...there were heatsinks on the ram. Not only was this letting them clock it even higher it also made the aftermarket for ram heatsinks even HOTTER.
~The KIT~
Coolerguys sent us some nice alpha heatsinks. Yep ALPHA,The makers of the overclocking revolution. They have your Ram OC'ing needs covered with these little babies. High quality aluminum heatsinks are just what the hot memory doctor ordered. What these little puppies do is attach to your memory chips via frag tape or thermal epoxy or what ever sticky stuff you chose and just sit there. Yep they sit there cooling the dickens out of your hot memory letting you OC even more.
~The DIRT~
There are many varieties of memory heatsinks. We have a review up of the ThermalTake ones and honestly these perform much better. You would think with these being smaller in both height and length that they would be at the bottom of the barrel in terms of performance but it is quality over quantity on this battle. These little guys are perfect for owners of Radeon VIVO's where larger ram sinks don't fit. With these in place (artic silver epoxy) on my ATI AIW Radeon I was able to bring it to even higher performances then before. The default speed of the ram is 166 (333 DDR) which I was able 2 bring up to 180 with out any added cooling. With the alpha performance heatsinks installed I was hitting 200mhz (400 DDR) and probably could have shot higher but the dinky heatsink on the GPU held me back.
~My VERDICT~
Small, relatively inexpensive, purdy, and high quality. What more can I say? These heatsinks are just what any hot small component in your computer could ask for. They fit virtually anywhere with their small footprint and low profile. They don't cost all that much epecially for the performance you get. They look nice in your system. And WOW they do they ever pack a cooling punch!
