First Retail Water-Cooled DDR2 Memory Tested

Twistedmelon writes "We've all heard of water cooling for processors and even graphics processors, in today's high end PCs. However, a water cooled memory module is something that hasn't been done until now. OCZ Technology recently announced their line of Flex XLC Water-Cooled RAM, with its integrated heat-spreaders that can be connected to any standard water cooling system. The memory operates much cooler under load with tight timings at DDR2-800 speeds. For those with water-cooling setups, these DIMMs could easily be tapped into an existing system allowing for quiet and robust cooling for your system memory as well."

Comments

zap...

[mastershake_phd]

Ive heard of water cooling CPUs, GPUs, and even the Northbridge, but never RAM. Still I guess they are getting hotter too. The only thing I got against water cooling is it uses water, no thanks. Though I would consider using a non-conductive fluid. There is this stuff called fluorinert made for just such an application. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert Its extremely expensive though. Ive heard Mineral oil works, then if you get a leak you just get a mess, instead of a fried PC.

Re:zap...

[NeoThermic]

You never fill a water cooling loop with normal water anyway. The two main reasons why is that first it's conductive, and second, it is impure, meaning you'll get problems later down the line with scum forming on the pipes and on the insides of coolers. Instead, the suggested water to use is deionized water, which is non-conductive* and doesn't suffer as much from scum forming (although many still like to use an anti-algae solution to combat the scum that forms.

NeoThermic

(* ok, it still conducts, but it has a higher resistance, and in computers there's few items that'll make deionized water conduct if it leaks. Much safer than normal water)

Re:zap...

[moonbender]

You haven't heard of water cooling RAM because it's a waste of resources, even more so than water cooling other components. RAM doesn't use a whole lot of power and consequently doesn't generate a lot of heat, a quick Google says about 10W. That's comparable to hard drives - the difference being that RAM doesn't really mind running at 50 to 80C, while HDDs do. DDR2 SDRAM doesn't need special active cooling, a somewhat ventilated case is easily enough.

Re:zap...

[CreatureComfort]

Except that what really makes water start to conduct is the impurities dissolved in it. Have you looked inside you computer lately? I've got industrial grade air scrubbers running in my house (roommate with allergies) and I still get dust buildup inside the case. As soon as that deionized water hits that dust, I'm sure the resulting mud would be conductive enough to be devastating.

On the other hand, we are getting closer to the point where everything inside the case that needs cooling could be hooked up to the water system. If we can add power supply and hard drives, then it might be possible to hermetically seal the case, and just cool the water.

Re:zap...

[Phreakiture]

It gives new meaning to the term "memory leak", no?

Soon enough.

[shirizaki]

We'll need water cooling for the water coolers.

And then someone will get the smart idea to stick his whole tower in the freezer. Then nerds will become buff by moving around all their heavy equipment.

But how much does it really improve things?

[JoeD]

Every time I see something like this, I wonder how much real world improvement you will see.

Sure, there may be a small improvement on a benchmark, but those rarely translate into something that's noticeable to the end user.

Or is it really more about having the shiniest toys?

Re:But how much does it really improve things?

[penp]

To a lot of people, water cooling isn't only about the possible performance increase, it's also about the sound (or lack thereof). Personally, I haven't tried water cooling yet, but I would definitely like to get the sound of a buzzsaw out of my PC.

As far as performance goes, I recently upgraded from RAM that had a CAS latency of 3 (Corsair XMS) to some that had more aggressive timings (OCZ performance ram) with a CAS latency of only 2. They were running at the same speeds (DDR 400 / PC3200), but at the faster timings the improvement was vastly greater than I had expected. After reading up on it some, a difference of 1ns can mean a lot when you're talking in terms of tens of millions of data cycles.

Re:But how much does it really improve things?

[SharpFang]

These radiators add at least 1.4 inch to your e-penis length.

Re:But how much does it really improve things?

[plover]

True, I'd never trust our build cluster to a bunch of potentially unstable, home-made overclocked Franken-PCs. And even if I would, I seriously doubt management would agree with me. They'd have one of two stock answers: "we'll add another server to the cluster" or "there's no money in the budget, live with it."

No extra credit points for figuring out which answer we'll get this year.

However, I will say that the recent set of Dell workstations we got in technically use water cooling. The heat sinks use heat pipes to passively transfer the heat from the CPU up to the large copper radiator fins, and the heat pipes most likely use water as their internal cooling fluid.

I love the smell of Slashvertisement in the mornin

[beavis88]

This is has been done for awhile. Yes, perhaps not DDR2 and memory/waterblock made by the same company, but in my mind, that's the least newsworthy part of this whole endeavor. Nothing to see here (except an OCZ ad), move along...

Not so

[Gazzonyx]

Clean (Distilled), water is an insulator. In fact, toms hardware inmersed a computer in water in their article Strip Out The Fans, Add 8 Gallons of Cooking Oil. Just used distilled water, and not tap water - as you shouldn't be using tap water, anyways since it eats away at the parts of a water cooling system.
As long as you don't have free electrons, you won't be passing current.

Re:Not so

[modecx]

Distilled water in a cooling system is no better than tap water. Sure, you won't have an amount of ions that will be signifigant to conduct electricity...for the first day, that is. The particles are still going to come off the metals that compose your system, and then you're on the path to being hosed by galvanic corossion.

The key is to not using dissimalar alloys in your system. An aluminum block and a copper radaitor are going to cause problems, unless you use some of the products out there which combat. That's the real key. Pure water is even more corrosive than tap water. Ideally, you want your alloys to be as close as possible, simply for the fact there will be little electrochemical potential.