GPU block + ramsinks vs All-In-One

What's your pleasure?

  • Quality GPU waterblock + Ramsinks

    Votes: 36 75.0%

  • GPU + RAM "All-in-one" waterblock

    Votes: 12 25.0%
  • Total voters
    48
that's a very good poll. I picked water block for the whole thing because it can cool better than ram sink. some of the highest end video card goes to 148 deg. F, I just can't see ram sink can do a good job
 
Bah, the all-in-one blocks tend to be really bad blocks. And watercooling memory is a waste of time and money. Unless it's chilled, of course, but that's a different story. There isn't much point in putting ramsinks on memory either. The heat transfer on top of the chips _REALLY_ sucks, so it won't do you much good... plus the gddr3 memory doesn't really require any cooling to run at rated speeds. Idk... I'd always get a fan blowing on those things way before i'd even consider any other type of cooling. It ends up the most effective usually.
 
i dunno, i went mcw55 and mc14 ramsinks, and those suckers get HOT after some gaming! I need to find some way of getting airflow in there... :(
 
Ramsinks will do just as good as WCing the ram, IF they have decent airflow over them. Watercooling them doesnt do much. You MIGHT squeeze another 5mhz outta your ram if your lucky.... and your gunna pay a $50 premium to do so.

Also, dont forget that if your mouting it on a card that has memory on both front and back, your only watercooling half the cards memory, in which case your really gunna get nowhere.

Just go with a good block and some sinks and save yourself $50.
 
aiit from my personal experience, if there was a full coverage block that DID IT RIGHT (hopefully the stasis? but too much $$ for me) then i would like full coverage. as it stands tho, i go gpu block and ram sinks. and let me tell you: that wasnt enough. i also gotta have a big fan blowing on the ramsinks + vregs on the back of hte card to keep em cool. they get RIDICULOUSLY HOT.

plus lets not forget all that ambient heat is being dumped into my case. so yea, a full coverage block, at the right price.. would be my preference as it would keep all that heat out of hte air and case and into the water loop to be dumped externally.

but since that doesnt exist in my mind yet... i voted ramsinks + gpu block.
 
Sinks as a whole are not all that great. Has anybody ever shown them to work better than the odds of pure chance? Yeah, they might allow you that extra 3 mhz where after a half hour you used to see corruption, but now with the ram sinks you don't. Of course that is 3 mhz on 600 mhz gddr3~.5%. Waste of money.

All in one blocks are not that great because if you change cards you are much more likely to need a new block to fit a new mem config/card layout.

Either way, save your $$$ for something that really helps.
 
superkdogg said:
Sinks as a whole are not all that great. Has anybody ever shown them to work better than the odds of pure chance? Yeah, they might allow you that extra 3 mhz where after a half hour you used to see corruption, but now with the ram sinks you don't. Of course that is 3 mhz on 600 mhz gddr3~.5%. Waste of money.

All in one blocks are not that great because if you change cards you are much more likely to need a new block to fit a new mem config/card layout.

Either way, save your $$$ for something that really helps.
Click to expand...

Your forgetting the fact that a ram watervblock adds the same almost non-existant performance gain for $50 more. Ramsinks are $15, ram watercooling is $50 more... and both have the same almost unnoticable effect.

Ramsinks are nice because they look nice, dont hurt, and are cheap. Can't say the same about the waterblocks.
 
I would like to be a GPU block plus ramsinks guy all the way, but lately I been buying flagships and been to chicken to put my gear on them. I mean, if the thing up and dies for no reason I'd like to be able to dress it back up to original. Only hopes of doing that nowadays is using the lame sticky tape and prying the ramsinks off.

In general though, ram doesnt gain much from cooling them beyond what ramsinks can do. So it's not worth heating up the water and sapping cooling power from the core.

Loved the GF6800GT setup. Perfect setup for watercooling. Don't even have to buy ramsinks.
 
Well I selected GPU Block + Ram SInks mainly because you usually don't have to buy a new blocks when upgrading to new video cards..
 
texuspete00 said:
I would like to be a GPU block plus ramsinks guy all the way, but lately I been buying flagships and been to chicken to put my gear on them. I mean, if the thing up and dies for no reason I'd like to be able to dress it back up to original. Only hopes of doing that nowadays is using the lame sticky tape and prying the ramsinks off.

In general though, ram doesnt gain much from cooling them beyond what ramsinks can do. So it's not worth heating up the water and sapping cooling power from the core.

Loved the GF6800GT setup. Perfect setup for watercooling. Don't even have to buy ramsinks.
Click to expand...

Nah. Use AS5. Its sticky enough to hole ramsinks on, and makes for easy removal when your done.
 
What do you guys think of naked ram with just a fan blowing on them? :p

I have wondered that because I'm also afraid if I use the dumb sticky tape, should a ramsink fall off, I hoped it would be safe for a little while.

edit: Whoa just AS5 didn't know that would work. Usually very comfortable in these projects but being forced to use tape for the first time got me a bit nervous. Im not sure how easy or hard it is to get them off. Only thing i did like that was pull off the southbridge sink on the socket A infinity. I'm sure its cake compared to some things I have done but new territory is new territory. Figure a hairdrier would do the trick.
 
el rolio said:
aiit from my personal experience, if there was a full coverage block that DID IT RIGHT (hopefully the stasis? but too much $$ for me) then i would like full coverage. as it stands tho, i go gpu block and ram sinks. and let me tell you: that wasnt enough. i also gotta have a big fan blowing on the ramsinks + vregs on the back of hte card to keep em cool. they get RIDICULOUSLY HOT.

plus lets not forget all that ambient heat is being dumped into my case. so yea, a full coverage block, at the right price.. would be my preference as it would keep all that heat out of hte air and case and into the water loop to be dumped externally.

but since that doesnt exist in my mind yet... i voted ramsinks + gpu block.
Click to expand...

^^ Spot on.

People forget that ramsinks are only as good as the thermal interface material/adhesive that holds them on i.e. crap, but will do. Sure it's not as critical as the TIM for your cpu/gpu core but it does warrant thought. After having a stock ramsink fall off in the past, I'd double check them now and again.

Ramsinks do their job with good airflow, but many of us don't want to add yet another fan if the airflow isn't there already. Without water cooling them, there's little choice. I'm looking forward to seeing how the (new) Aquagratix handles the X1900!
 
I still say that a 120mm fan blowing over your card owns ramsinks and a ramblock combined. Of course you could add ramsinks for extra 5mhz, but the fan would win you much more in the short run. In the long run, it will keep your card from dying for a bit longer. Video cards are very prone to death from overclocking (as it is, they don't have a very long average lifespan - a year, maybe... you could easily make that 4 weeks).
 
iddqd said:
I still say that a 120mm fan blowing over your card owns ramsinks and a ramblock combined. Of course you could add ramsinks for extra 5mhz, but the fan would win you much more in the short run. In the long run, it will keep your card from dying for a bit longer. Video cards are very prone to death from overclocking (as it is, they don't have a very long average lifespan - a year, maybe... you could easily make that 4 weeks).
Click to expand...
i haven't killed a vid card yet, and i OC them as far as they will OC without volt modding them.

i voted for block and sinks. no gain from WCing the memory, since you need some case airflow even if you are WCing.
 
iddqd said:
I still say that a 120mm fan blowing over your card owns ramsinks and a ramblock combined. Of course you could add ramsinks for extra 5mhz, but the fan would win you much more in the short run. In the long run, it will keep your card from dying for a bit longer. Video cards are very prone to death from overclocking (as it is, they don't have a very long average lifespan - a year, maybe... you could easily make that 4 weeks).
Click to expand...


If your cards average lifespan is only one read... and reduced to 4 weeks from overclocking, then its not the cards, its you. I have killed a card from overclocking, and i've pushed every card I have owned to the absolute max.
 
I voted GPU block + ramsinks...

I tried the whole all in 1 thing with a NV68 on my 6800 Ultra back in Mayish last year... The water cooling of the RAM didn't help at all, and actually caused my temps to go up (this was after several reseatings and making sure contact was made).

The other thing I dont like is the large amount of weight it puts on the mobo slot... all it takes is for that hex screw to come loose and you have a gigantic problem on your hands.

Another problem I had was I was never sure that the all in one block made contact with ALL of the RAM chips. With the ramsinks, you are 100% sure that each chip is in contact with its own RAM sink.

And I also agree with the above post... I have never had a card die on me in less than 1 year, even after wailing on it with OC's... I'd like to see the proof of the avg lifespan of a graphics card being 1 year...
 
Viper87227 said:
If your cards average lifespan is only one read... and reduced to 4 weeks from overclocking, then its not the cards, its you. I have killed a card from overclocking, and i've pushed every card I have owned to the absolute max.
Click to expand...
No seriously these boards have planned obsolence. They don't want us to be using the same video card for 4 years, they want it to break and sell us a new and equally shitty video card. Don't you understand how the coporations think?
 
iddqd said:
No seriously these boards have planned obsolence. They don't want us to be using the same video card for 4 years, they want it to break and sell us a new and equally shitty video card. Don't you understand how the coporations think?
Click to expand...
no, seriously, back this up somehow.

planned obsolescece means that they are too slow to run modern games a few years later, however they continue to work for many years if you don't so something to break them.

radeon 9800 pro, gforce4 MX, geforece 4600 Ti, vodoo 4, rage 128 pro and rage IIc are all old cards that i or someone i know has which still work just fine as backup/test cards, or cards for e-mail/wordprocessing machines. those cards all saw a few years of hard use prior to being moved to other boxes and then the backup parts bin.

i think that you are full of shit.
 
Happy Hopping said:
Show me a link that sells WB on RAM for $50.
Click to expand...
bargain joe's crazy going out of business sale, maybe?

i think that you are mis-reading someone. what i'm reading is that you pay an extra $50 over and above what a GPU only block costs, in order to get mem cooling.
 
I'm still running a original 9800Pro (max OC) in my second rig. It's been Bios hacked from the day I got it (right after release date). Still no problems with it what's so ever. A OC'd video card will last many many years OC'd if you know what you're doing. I have a PolarFlo GPU block with OCZ BGA ram sinks on it.
 
I voted GPU block + ramsinks...

Much easier when you upgrade your video card at leasr twice a year.
 
R1ckCa1n said:
Much easier when you upgrade your video card at leasr twice a year.
Click to expand...
i think that you already realize this, but just to make it clear: i hate you. :p
 
Video cards that crap out after a year? Hu? Wha?

I've got an old Voodoo 3 3Dfx card with a whopping 32 meg of RAM that I bought new way back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. It's still chugging away on my "Look, it still works v2.0" box running Windows 95.

(I don't want to hear it... "Look, it still works v1.0" is a Commodore 128 and somewhere in the attic is a Commodore Vic-20, wonder if I can fire that bad boy up.)

Okay, you did qualify it by saying that cards die w/in a year when they're overclocked, but if you're frying cards in a year your overclock might be just a touch too high.
 
texuspete00 said:
Your old voodoo probably didnt spit out 20 watts, nevermind run 80C.
Click to expand...
and wattage has exactly what to do with lifespan?

hell, by that logic, my a64 is going die much sooner than my old XP mobile.........even if the two run at the same temps when overclocked and the XP was over volted much farther.
 
I'll go out on a limb and say that starting with the Geforce 6 series of boards, we are going to see dramatically shorter service lives out of these parts than we are accustomed to with say an older Voodoo3 or TNT2 etc.
Not only are they failing at greater rates out of the box, but the insane amounts of heat stock cooled units put out and the strain modern GPU's place on the power circuitry are bound to take their toll.
We'll see, but my bet is that nearly 50% of these boards will fail by their third birthdays. :eek:
 
consumer9000 said:
*snip*
We'll see, but my bet is that nearly 50% of these boards will fail by their third birthdays. :eek:
Click to expand...

3 years I'll buy... of course... how many people [H] enough to start playing with water inside their computers and overclocking a video card are keeping a GPU for 3 years under heavy load? By it's third birthday (if it's still around) it's probably been relegated to a box in the corner for a web browser, file server, distributed computing/SETI, etc. or eBay-ed.

I just took exception with the 1 year MTBF.
 
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