I’m in the process of “upgrading” my desktop, and part of that upgrade includes a cooling overhaul. My desktop is a loud bitch, and my goal was to cool it as best as possible… and more importantly, as silent as possible. As part of my plan to lower the case temperature and get rid of the front air intake fan (as recommended by AMD’s Cooling Guide), I decided to order some Nexus Memory Heatspreaders from EndPCNoise.com to cool my RAM.

Installing them seems easy enough, so easy in fact, that I ran into a few problems. 🙂

First, you must ensure that when sticking your RAM onto the adhesive tape, you line up the RAM exactly in the middle of the heatspreader casing. While this may seem blatantly obvious, even a slight millimeter deviation from center can cause problems when seating your RAM back into the motherboard socket. One of my RAM sticks was slightly off-center in the heatspreader, making it impossible to re-seat the stick. The overhanging edges of the heatspreader were preventing the RAM clip from properly locking into place and seating the RAM. I ended up having to use a pair of pliers to bend the overhanging part of the heatspreader to make it fit.

Second, do not seperate the two pieces of the heatspreader when sticking your RAM to it. The heatspreaders have a little hinge at the top, and in order to close the heatspreader over your RAM, there needs to be a slight bit of head room for the hinges to slide into place. I made the mistake of sticking one half of the heatspreader on my RAM first. I wrongly positioned the RAM flush up against the top of the heatspreader, but this prevented the other half of the heatspreader from clipping back on! Think of it as a 3-ring binder: if you put too many papers in the binder, the binder won’t fully close. I ended up having to attach only one hinge, and the other one (that wouldn’t slide into the other hinge) I had to bend up with a pair of pliers. The provided clips hold both sides of the heatspreader in place well, so I’m not too worried about it, but for a moment there I was worried that I’d have a RAM stick with only half of a heatspreader.

Finally, that adhesive tape is amazingly sticky. If you mess up placing it on your RAM, there’s no going back, so make sure you do it right the first time!

So let this be a lesson to you if you’re installing heatspreaders on your RAM – it may look like an easy no-brainer, but it actually requires quite a bit of attention.