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Heatpipes to make an appearance in memory design this year

OCZ Technology today announced its newest memory designs behind closed doors. The design, currently codenamed Flexpipe, will make an appearance on high-end OCZ XTC as early as February 2007.

The design of the Flexpipe heatsink revolves around a heatpipe that transfers heat from the module to another heatsink one centimeter above the memory bank.  Air can pass freely under and over the heatsink bank -- an approach that allows air to move over the heatsinks of multiple modules when installed on a motherboard.

The new memory design just finished its pre-production trials and the company will move into test trial phases this month. 

OCZ recently announced its hybrid FlexXLC heatsink, a design that can work as a watercooled or aircooled sink.  OCZ Technology Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Alex Mei, claims "the Flexpipe is mainly designed for a memory platform above the OCZ XTC series memory, but will be priced more aggressively than FlexXLC modules." 

Most likely, Flexpipe devices will go head-to-head against Corsair's wildly popular DOMINATOR series memory introduced in mid-2006.

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Premium Ram
By bwave on 1/10/2007 11:05:21 PM , Rating: 2
I love it when people waste money on "premium" ram. OCZ has a very high failure rate, along with Geil, Corsair, pretty much all of them. I don't understand how people pay twice as much for ram, only to have it fail. I use Supertalent with far superior results. Guess it's the same fanboys that buy Asus boards. We have 15% of Asus either DOA or fail within 1 week. I can't tell you the last time we had a Abit, DFI or Biostar board fail.




RE: Premium Ram
By KaiserCSS on 1/10/2007 11:57:27 PM , Rating: 3
EXACTLY. This is a result of plain old ignorance. Guys looking for the "latest and greatest" with piles of money will no doubt buy into this crap, especially if they are computer illiterate. Or maybe these brands appeal to goof balls who like overly expensive products. Whichever, they should really try to do *gasp* research about this kind of thing.

I have been using Kingston ValueRAM, Corsair Value Select, and even cheap miscellaneous RAM and I have never had a stick of RAM fail on me. Hell, I even moderately overclock/ tighten up timings quite a bit. Perhaps I've been far too lucky. But I don't fall for this stuff. I will not pay $100's extra for some gimmicky heatsink and "premium performance". I'll stick with what I'm familiar with and what I know to work just as well as any overpriced product.


RE: Premium Ram
By RussianSensation on 1/11/2007 12:22:51 AM , Rating: 2
Right, but that doesn't mean you cannot find some outstanding deals on premium ram. A couple months ago DDR2-800 prices were through the roof. I ended up picking Corsair XMS2 PC5400 2 gig chips with ProMos memory on them. I was easily able to clock those chips from 667mhz stock speed to 1000mhz

Link: http://i128.photobucket.com/albums/p175/BestJinjo/...

As a result I was able to overclock my E6400 to 3.4ghz and I paid $160 for this ram.

Secondly, I would hope most people who buy premium ram are not price sensitive and simply want the best performance (even if it is only 1-5%). At the same time I do agree that ram should be arguably one of that last components to spend $ on for price/performance ratio, well...at least until Core 2 Duo platform stopped allowing downward ram:cpu ratios.


RE: Premium Ram
By pjpizza on 1/11/2007 3:29:56 AM , Rating: 1
quote:
This is a result of plain old ignorance


OK... I think you're just jealous! ;)

I've put together quite a number of desktops (like, a zillion!), and the ones that have used premium components have outlasted the "cheap" ones (without overclocking) by far...

The desktop I use has most of its components from around year 2000 (except for the CPU). ASUS MB, Corsair RAM... And it's still goin' strong.

CAN'T BEAT IT!

I've actually thought of upgrading since Vista is on it's way, but I just can't justify it, since I don't play PC games (a GeForce TI4600 has put a stop to that).

So, the point is, err, buy expensive, and it will last longer. So there...


RE: Premium Ram
By pjpizza on 1/11/2007 3:33:00 AM , Rating: 3
Sorry, forgot one thing:

I don't mean "Buy really really really expensive stuff". I just mean, you get what you pay for, up to a point. It's finding this point that will give you good value for your money.


RE: Premium Ram
By mindless1 on 1/11/2007 10:55:12 AM , Rating: 2
Ignoring gimmicks, in practically everyone area of a PC you can pay more to get better, why would you think memory is some exception? Faster CPU, better case, video card, etc, etc.

I'm not talking about same MHz & same timings with only a fancy heatsink slapped on, there are always going to be those who choose to pay disproportionately more for that last 10% performance, and they do overclock a substantial amount more than Kingston Valueram if carefully chosen.

So no, what you're sticking with doesn't work just as well, it works slower at lower cost. If that's your choice, fine, but along with gimmicks there will still always be premium performing parts in any given era that cost more.


RE: Premium Ram
By Dactyl on 1/11/2007 1:30:07 PM , Rating: 2
I don't know anything about the failure rate, but the focus on faster RAM is silly and provides very little performance increase in real world benchmarks. Dollar for dollar, it only makes sense in the highest-end gaming systems, if anywhere.

It's probably a huge moneymaker for the RAM companies, though: they identify the fastest modules, bin them, and mark them up at some outrageous price that some people are gullible enough to pay.

For the amount of money people are spending on some RAM modules, you could get a phase change system for your PC--that would boost performance!


RE: Premium Ram
By phusg on 1/11/2007 4:25:06 AM , Rating: 3
Isn't this higher failure rate due to the premium brands being more likely to be overclocked?


RE: Premium Ram
By therealnickdanger on 1/11/2007 2:26:23 PM , Rating: 3
Whoa, whoa, whoa! Slow down there, "Mr. I-Use-Logic-Man"

I've purchased "budget" components for longer than I can remember and never had a problem. I'll save a couple hundred dollars and deal with being 10% slower than the next guy any day.


RE: Premium Ram
By brshoemak on 1/11/2007 7:41:39 AM , Rating: 3
quote:
only to have it fail. I use Supertalent with far superior results


Sorry, I have to chime in on this one. We had 50 PC's setup for a medical center, all using what I consider good components (Abit boards, Antec or Enermax PSU's, Seagate drives, etc.) with the only unknown entity being the use of Super Talent memory.

Every single time we received a call about a computer that wouldn't boot or Windows errors it was ALWAYS the memory (confirmed by MemTest86+). It got to a point were I would just carry around an extra stick or two in case the inevitable happened.

Mind you, this memory was initially purchased over a 6 month period so it's not like a single batch was the culprit. I know every one has their own experiences, but based on mine I wil NEVER buy Super Talent memory. Again, to each their own.


RE: Premium Ram
By marcoo624 on 1/11/2007 11:44:59 AM , Rating: 2
Buying RAM is like buying a Processor, you pay more you get a faster chip. They dont make a "different" processor that has a higher clock speed they just partition the chips based on where they were on the die when it was made, those chips closer to the center can usually be clocked higher without added voltages. Its the samething with Ram chips, chips on a better piece of the silicon are at a premium because there are less of them and they can be clocked faster.

Better modules dont fail, i dont know where you got this data from. I have nothing but problems with value ram. You really do get what you pay for.


RE: Premium Ram
By EastCoast on 1/12/2007 1:04:56 AM , Rating: 4
quote:
I love it when people waste money on "premium" ram. OCZ has a very high failure rate, along with Geil, Corsair, pretty much all of them . I don't understand how people pay twice as much for ram, only to have it fail. I use Supertalent with far superior results. Guess it's the same fanboys that buy Asus boards. We have 15% of Asus either DOA or fail within 1 week . I can't tell you the last time we had a Abit, DFI or Biostar board fail.

This is the biggest lie I have ever read. I have been building computers for over 15 years and it has always been the luck of the draw. To make a statement like this with no proof is not only bias but inaccurate. SuperTalent is not better then any other ram. Here's a bit of "education" it's the ICs used not the name of the manufacture that matters most. And most ram manufactures are using similar ICs. That alone discredits your entire post.

Also note, I have installed Corsair PC3200, PC5400 (very long time ago), PC6400 and PC8500. These ram are still in use today and without problems.

And, where did motherboard come into play that relates to this article? You say you have a 15% Asus products DOA? I would question your supplier more so then the manufacture. And don't say you get it from the manufacture because everyone would know you are lying. If this was remotely true you would be reading about this on every forum you come across. Odd that I only read this from you.


Wow...
By Kurz on 1/10/2007 7:55:38 PM , Rating: 2
Frankly I wish people wouldnt buy Ram for exotic cooling solutions that arent necessary.




RE: Wow...
By MadAd on 1/11/2007 5:46:01 AM , Rating: 2
OMG i nearly spat my tea on the monitor- what a useless waste of a heatpipe- how on earth is moving heat off the strip and onto another sink going to help the performance of the ram? Its just more spin for the sake of adding more $$ and calling it 'enthusiast'.

Id like to see some benchmarks with the cooler unit removed completely- I bet the max overclock and latency steps end up the same in both cases.


RE: Wow...
By Targon on 1/11/2007 9:49:58 AM , Rating: 2
Memory can get fairly hot if it's overclocked with a higher voltage used. For those who do this, cooling can help a LOT since in many cases, failures are caused by the memory overheating. Obviously, there are cases where the memory controller is the limiting factor as well, regardless of where that controller may be(CPU or chipset).

Watercooling for memory may be going a bit overboard, but if the heatpipe doesn't raise the price too high, I don't see that this solution is a bad way to go.

I've also seen a number of memory failures from cheap memory while having far fewer problems with name brand and fewer yet from premium memory.

Infineon has given me a LOT of problems(the memory just fails in some cases after only six months). I've run into some problems with Samsung memory as well. In all failure cases, no overclocking was involved in the system, the stuff just went bad(system install without a problem, system ran properly, until one day when errors started to happen).


??
By teng029 on 1/10/2007 8:03:56 PM , Rating: 5
you have got to be kidding me.




RE: ??
By Samus on 1/11/2007 1:21:43 AM , Rating: 1
took the words right out of my mouth.

i'll take 4gb of basic, reliable, cool running ram over 2gb of this complex, unreliable, volcano hot ram...probably at the same price.


DDR2 is dead...
By Comdrpopnfresh on 1/10/2007 9:25:02 PM , Rating: 2
None of the processors out there saturate the available bandwidth. The increases in speeds do little to increase performance- only power consumption and heat. Dailytech even mentioned this the last review of ram (crucial or corsair, I don't remember). Perhaps some architectural changes in DDR3 or XDR can allow for processors and systems to more easily use the bandwidth- or maybe the next generation of processors.




RE: DDR2 is dead...
By Fenixgoon on 1/10/2007 10:25:51 PM , Rating: 1
good memory still can make a heck of a difference though, make no mistake of that. i was looking at an anandtech memory article just to see how much a difference it'd really make using different types of ram, and the results were quite shocking. i was expecting maybe a few FPS difference for the games, but IIRC, the differences were up to 10 or 20 FPS between good ram and "bad" ram.


RE: DDR2 is dead...
By therealnickdanger on 1/11/2007 2:28:38 PM , Rating: 3
quote:
the differences were up to 10 or 20 FPS between good ram and "bad" ram.

Yeah, it was amazing that paying double for RAM boosted fps in FEAR from 130fps to 145fps.


Would be helpful now
By Ebbyman on 1/11/2007 9:28:51 AM , Rating: 2
Well considering that I bought a new system with regular Corsair XMS ram that is overheating after a bunch of hard gaming hours, that OCZ ram above does not look too ridiculous to me now. Now I have to install a fan over the ram to cool it hoping that it solves the issue. However, other people are right. I thought the memory was bad because it failed my system failed Orthos after a few hours running it and I was getting memory "sanity" comments etc. When I would run Memtest, it would fail almost everything. In the morning (on the phone with tech support), I was a bit taken back when Memtest passed without errors. Then I remembered that all my issues really begin after a few hours of gaming leading me to believe it was from heat. So in summary, I hope the ram cooling idea becomes more of a standard.




RE: Would be helpful now
By nerdye on 1/12/2007 10:55:24 PM , Rating: 2
I also just purchased corsair xms2 ddr2 ram, of the ddr2 800 flavor. I have not yet over clocked my e6300 on a ds3 yet, but I get such good frame rates in all games with my 7950gt I'm waiting for a need. I'm curious which xms 2 modules you purchased and what voltage and speeds and you running them at to get such heat?


Excessive
By mindless1 on 1/11/2007 11:07:32 AM , Rating: 2
I'd be more interested in getting something with the heatpipes actually on top of the chips, IF they could do it for the same price as w/o this piping which they obviously would not.

Since the pipe is only at the top I'd rather they just did a better job maching out a crosscut pattern on the 'sinks and have them slightly taller and well bonded to the chips with thermal epoxy. Maybe at the top have a couple of tapped holes spaced far enough apart for a 50mm fan (not included, if the user wanted to add their own for crazy voltage use).

So I favor the simpler approach, do what was alreay being done but get it right instead of going for more complex and costly. Then again I don't ever put crazy voltage through my memory, we'd need some reliable independent testing to determine if and when it would make any difference with the pipes, or better 'sink & bond, etc. I'm not suggesting this is what everyone should buy, rather it's just one product you can take or leave if you know you want to do something extreme.

I can say something positive about OCZ support though, last time I sent them a module for replacement they sent back a matched set, twice as much memory.




RE: Excessive
By nerdye on 1/12/2007 8:54:10 PM , Rating: 2
Excessive,
yes, practical, yes, but only for the OC masterminds that want an extra bit of power from their systems. Those who buy really high end ram have other high end components in their systems. I agree that you get what you pay for, but if you really want to splurge on one component, give the money to the processor for general computing, or the gpu for games. Yet to each their own. I wish my e6300 was a kentsfield, but I won't knock the next man rolling the kentsfield, hats off to him. The same should be said for high end ram. To each their own.


Now ram...
By Polynikes on 1/11/2007 1:48:34 PM , Rating: 2
What will they put heat pipes on next? My bet is on hard drives. And I won't buy one.




RE: Now ram...
By therealnickdanger on 1/11/2007 2:32:01 PM , Rating: 2
It's missing something
By SomeYoungMan on 1/10/2007 8:08:05 PM , Rating: 2
Slap on an ionic breeze generator and I'll say "Sold!"




HS compatibility
By Howard on 1/10/2007 11:02:12 PM , Rating: 2
Hope it doesn't interfere with the larger heat sinks.




By cornfedone on 1/11/2007 9:13:40 AM , Rating: 2
OCZ has really gotten heavily into gimmicks that provide little if any performance advantage. They, like many marketeers, have found that gullible PC enthusiasts will buy into the hype and dump their money faster than a drunken sailor in a bar. This foolish heat pipe cooling is another example of dumb.

Virtually all tests have shown that lowering the operating temp of all current brands of performance RAM below their typical warm-to-hot operating temps, provides exactly NO increase in overclockability, stability or performance - NONE. So pretty LEDs, heatsinks and now heat pipes are just pissin away money on nothing of substance.

As far as brand name memory is concerned having build high-end enterprise based PCs for close to 20 years, I can say that I've never had a defective memory stick from anyone but Crucial. Buying quality memory such as Corsair is a good investment. Buying over-priced, over-rated, hyped to death memory is for those with more money than brains.

While you can overclock quality memory such as Corsair, OCZ, and others, the system performance gain is so insignificant it's never a practical purchase. The over-priced, over-hyped memory is for those without a life who are entertained by a theoretical performance increase that has no basis in reality.

It's common knowledge that many sticks of RAM that are returned believed to be defective, when in fact they are not. Many PC enthusiasts have little tech background and thus assume many falsehoods concerning the hardware because it is improperly configured. In reality there is probably 100:1 bad PSUs out there compared to bad sticks of quality brand name RAM. Yes the off-brand, low quality, cheap price RAM is generally bad news and to be avoided at all costs if you need a reliable PC. You will pay dearly in the end for using most of this third rate RAM.

I have no problem with and actually recommend purchasing top quality RAM from Corsair, etc. but skip the LEDs and other foolish gimmicks if you want good value and performance. Buy RAM suitable for your application and you'll get the most bang for the buck.




Interesting? Yes.
By Goty on 1/10/07, Rating: 0
"Game reviewers fought each other to write the most glowing coverage possible for the powerhouse Sony, MS systems. Reviewers flipped coins to see who would review the Nintendo Wii. The losers got stuck with the job." -- Andy Marken











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