Cooling my RAM?

S

Synomenon

Supreme [H]ardness
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Feb 10, 2007
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Right now, I have airflow going straight through the case to cool the CPU / HSF. If I add a fan on the side of the case, blowing at the RAM (green rectangle):

sZe38k6.jpg



Would adding this "cross-flow" negatively impact CPU temps.?
 
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I don't know what the question is, but I don't think that fan in green will do much. You've already got fresh air coming in over the RAM.

Your larger issue is what's happening to the exhaust of your GPU. If you aren't running a blower setup on the GPU i'd generally say you don't have enough exhaust in your case right now.
 
I just didn't illustrate it, but the 1080ti has a reference style blower and it exhausts heat out the back. I was mostly concerned about the stick of RAM behind the first one. Doesn't the first stick block airflow to the stick directly behind it?
 
no but its pointless as noted above. feed extra air to your gpu if anything. ram only needs very minimal airflow.
 
Synomenon said:
I just didn't illustrate it, but the 1080ti has a reference style blower and it exhausts heat out the back. I was mostly concerned about the stick of RAM behind the first one. Doesn't the first stick block airflow to the stick directly behind it?
Click to expand...

No, you've got two fans in the front blowing forward. I don't think you have much room for improvement at this point. Unless you're seeing abnormally high RAM temps (Which I doubt you are) I wouldn't worry about it.

The only thing you could improve is upgrading the two fans in the front and the one in the rear to 140mm if your case supports it. Other than that you are at the point where anything else you do just isn't worth it.
 
Fan pushing air down into front to back airflow will likely just create turbulence destroying smooth front to back airflow over RAM and to CPU cooler. Airflow is simple displacement. We can't have two sources of air flow trying to move through same space. Is your RAM running hot enough it even needs more airflow?
 
if you are running even close to modern system, RAM temperatures are not very likely to need ny form of excessive direct cooling, the cpu, gpu and the like probably love it (as does M.2 drive) but RAM is highly unlikely, unless I suppose you are vastly over volting it (extreme overclocking on the ram with very high volts) DDR3 and DDR4 are generally quite cool running compared to top end DDR2 "speed sticks"

most if not all the "fancy" heatsinks on DDR3-4 are for show, not because they are needed IMO based on all I have read.

As others have pointed out, try to keep airflow as direct (smooth) as possible, in one direction, out the other, this helps prevent stale air or excessive turbulence from robbing potential cooling effect.

As long as you have enough air going towards the cpu and enough air going towards the gpu to keep themselves as reasonable cool as possible then likely the RAM is nowhere close to "hot" unlike VRM can be when using liquid/AIO for "most" people who use those they tend to overclock which makes VRM get quite hot with little airflow, but just looking at pictures from a blind perspective, airflow should be pretty good without that extra green fan crammed in there just my $0.2.
 
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