CPU Cooler blocking extra DIMM

dannyboyee82

dannyboyee82

dannyboyee82

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4 Sep 2009
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107
I have the Zalman CNPS10X Extreme cooler on the ASUS Maximus III board, the fan is stopping me from adding other G-Skill Ripjaw modules because of the height of the G-Skill.

Can you recommend me any RAM to go with my G-Skill that will match perfectly but without the height of my current modules?
 
Couldn't you just chop a section of the fins off so it clears the required height? It might effect the temps though, depends how much you need to take off.

EDIT: Actually I don't think it will, if you think about it that bottom cornerdoesn't have air moving through it as the fan doesn't move air over the corners.
 
as muel said the cheapest way is to trim the ram fins down a bit or you could turn the cooler 90 degrees!
 
How about 180 degrees, and then turn the fan too so it pulls air through the cooler?
Click to expand...

Good idea, I'll try that tonight.. do you think I'll lose anything by doing that? I can't imagine the strength of airflow would be quite as good, but it is certainly a financially better option. I'll just have to do some testing.. again.. yawn!
 
I had the same problem on a Artic Freezer Pro 7, and a Gigabyte board.

Turned the cooler around, only issue is fan will not turn around, this left me with air in opposite direction (so there is a loop of hot air in top of case!). It's not great as hot air is being fired against memory, had to underclock memory (was overheating I guess). Still it's all working fine now, and in the grand scheme it won't make any difference to me.

I maybe should have just sold the cooler, but once it was fitted did not like taking it all off again.
 
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Bad news, Zalman were obviously not as forward thinking as you guys and decided to make it impossible to turn the fan around on my cooler. I think I could probably fit a regular 120mm fan on there and do away with the one Zalman provided, but that still leaves me with the issue of drawing less air through the heatsink. Looking at the area that the cooler covers over the DIMM, I'd have to take off more or less all of the fins to get them to fit properly.. something I don't think that I should do.

It's back to square one, I'm considering a H50 now. However, when I look at the temps people are getting with their overclocks it looks no different or even worse than air cooling. My Zalman gives me a max temp of 67C on load with 23C idle, that's with a 4ghz overclock on my i7 860.

Are there any other slightly better options, or any smaller air coolers.. or at least ones that don't go over the DIMMs? I'm really hacked off that nobody mentioned this issue in any of the reviews I read about the Zalman CNPS10X Extreme.
 
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I've got the same problem, but 3 DIMMs is more than enough for my needs. You could always sell your current sticks and put some 4Gb units in?
 
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