GPU ram cooling with AIO

Soldato
Joined
23 Mar 2005
Posts
3,779
I'm waiting on a Corasir H55 to replace the old Antec Khuler 620 on my 980ti (kraken G10). I have had a nightmare trying to find a solution to stick the ram sinks onto the 12 chips on the card (various tape options have all failed, leaving a pile of ramsinks on the bottom of my case).

I have finally sourced some thermal adhesive designed for the purpose, but it is only rated at 1 W/mK which is well below the pads and normal (non-sticky) compounds. Is that conductive enough to sufficiently cool the RAM? I noticed in another thread that swapping the pads on the new 3090s can knock nearly 10C off the temps (they were mining, so stressing the ram far more than i will just gaming).

Unfortunately the 980ti has no temp sensor on the Ram so I cant test it.
 
Associate
Joined
15 May 2020
Posts
387
I had a Kraken G12 on my 2080 ti, no heatsinks on memory chips, just the 92mm fan pushing air straight onto them (I replaced the NZXT one with a Noctua, and also added 2x 40mm fans for the memory chips near the i/o, but that's strictly a 2080 ti issue).

The whole thing ran great, overclocked like a champ, +1300 on the memory, no issues at all. When you've got a fan blowing air right onto the memory chips, I don't think you need the heatsinks. I think some YouTuber tested this (maybe JayZ but can't recall).

I'm assuming here that all of the chips on the 980ti are covered by the fan over the pcb.

The 3090 issue is different as the chips are behind a backplate and aren't getting blasted direct with air, plus they're GDDR6X, the hot new product.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
23 Mar 2005
Posts
3,779
Under the wind force 3 cooler the ram chips had thermal pads on them and were in contact with the metal of the main cooler - so had pretty good cooling. Part of why I was keen to make sure they had adequate cooling under the Kraken. I have tried several tape solutions and used both the Alaska TIM cleaner (the lemony fresh one from back in the day!) and straight isopropanol- neither seemed to help - the tape sticks well to the sinks, but just doesn’t bind to the ram :rolleyes:

Interestingly the cooler comes with a backplate, but that is not in contact with anything on the rear of the card, so it either for show, or to give rigidity to the card. It did get very hot though.
 
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