Overclocking ram without a heat spreader

[damian61]

Hi, I've started my overclock journey last week, I was able to overclock my generic crucial ram from 2400Mhz to 3000 Mhz. Am I going to kill it? Is it safe to leave it on 3000Mhz cl18? 

 

thank you

[damian61]

2 minutes ago, AdkatkaShow said:

You do know that those fancy heat spreaders on ram sticks made for design purposes right?

Anyways it will not. Clock is not what kills. Voltage is.

As I remember I left the voltage on auto, but will double check it after work. 

[SavageNeo]

8 minutes ago, WikiForce said:

they are only for aesthetics, ram doesn't really require heat-spreader cooling (or any kind of cooling for that matter)

ram is only stable when under 50C. also high capacity and or high speed sticks need either a heat spreader or active coling fan. taht is why you can find cooling fans included when going over 4400mhz or 64 gig stikc at corsair.

[mariushm]

If you go and download the datasheet for the RAM chips on a stick you'll see that they're rated for 85c or higher.  

 

Overall a single stick of memory doesn't consume more than a couple of watts or so, spread over those 8 or 16 ram chips, which dissipate the heat into the circuit board and into the motherboard through the contacts of the ram stick. 

 

Heatsinks help a tiny bit evening out the heat between the ram sticks, and giving a bigger surface for the heat to dissipate, but they're mostly esthetical. 

 

Your RAM sticks will be fine, your 2400 Mhz to 3000 Mhz is not significant enough to cause problems, as long as you didn't increase the voltage way above safe values (like 1.35v...1.4v)

 

It's POSSIBLE that you could get memory errors or issues with high frequencies like 4400 Mhz and high chip temperatures, but those are edge cases, where the quality of the motherboard and how the traces between the ram sticks and the cpu socket are layed out also starts to matter. Keeping the chips cooler may help in such scenarios but it's not a rule or a requirement for lower overclocks like 2400 - > 3000 mhz.

 

[damian61]

On 1/12/2021 at 11:41 AM, mariushm said:

If you go and download the datasheet for the RAM chips on a stick you'll see that they're rated for 85c or higher.  

 

Overall a single stick of memory doesn't consume more than a couple of watts or so, spread over those 8 or 16 ram chips, which dissipate the heat into the circuit board and into the motherboard through the contacts of the ram stick. 

 

Heatsinks help a tiny bit evening out the heat between the ram sticks, and giving a bigger surface for the heat to dissipate, but they're mostly esthetical. 

 

Your RAM sticks will be fine, your 2400 Mhz to 3000 Mhz is not significant enough to cause problems, as long as you didn't increase the voltage way above safe values (like 1.35v...1.4v)

 

It's POSSIBLE that you could get memory errors or issues with high frequencies like 4400 Mhz and high chip temperatures, but those are edge cases, where the quality of the motherboard and how the traces between the ram sticks and the cpu socket are layed out also starts to matter. Keeping the chips cooler may help in such scenarios but it's not a rule or a requirement for lower overclocks like 2400 - > 3000 mhz.

 

I played some with the settings, now it's running on 2933Mhz with cl16 and 1.38V. No isssues for now, userbenchmarks shows 20% increase (from 86% 2400mhz -> 106%)

[Guest]

Put a fan directly on the memory to keep it running cool. This is important for your stability.

 

Removing heat spreaders from memory is an age old trick. Mostly because the thermal pads are horrible for heat transfer.

 

Nice OC!