Kool Solutions Memory Cooling Fan Review

Cooling/VGA & Other Cooling by piotke @ 2005-06-04

Overclocking memory has come a long way, in the old days pushing more then 2.9v through your DDR sticks was considered insane; now certain manufactures are making products geared especially for high voltage (3.6+v). With the increased power comes increased heat and active memory cooling is becoming a necessity. Let?s see if this ?memory cooling? Solution from Kool is any good.

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Intro & Test Setup

In our last episode ...

The name Kool Solutions might not ring a bell with many readers, the company has been around for some time, focusing on providing easy to use and effective cooling products. Their last product was the Chill Vent (reviewed here) and today we are looking at “Memory Cooling Fan”, which can be used on its own or in cooperation with the Chill Vent.

Madshrimps (c)
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What is it exactly and do we need it?

The design of the “Memory Cooling Fan” is nothing too complicated, a small transparent L-shaped piece of plexi holds 2x40mm fans and this construction can be mounted to hover over your DIMM slots. The short leg of the “L” has dual sided adhesive tape so you can stick the fans where they are needed. In the package you'll find an extra piece of this tape, in case you need to change location of the unit.

The unit draws power from your 12v line through a 4-pin molex; this molex is a pass-through one so you won’t lose a connection. The 40mm fans spin at 5000rpm, they are loud when you put your ear right next to it (~60dBA) but the noise drops fast when you put a bit of distance between yourself and the fans, at 50cm they were no longer audible in the test room (room noise ~36dBA).

The reason why these fans might help you out is because of the new Memory sticks which have been released onto the market, these modules perform very good when large amounts of voltage is fed through their circuits, however this leads to higher then average temperatures and active cooling is no longer a mere luxury, it’s required so says Mushkin.



Madshrimps (c) Madshrimps (c) Madshrimps (c)
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Although the product’s name leads to believe that its sole purpose is cooling memory, you can always be a little bit more creative and use a pair of these 40mm fans to cool down a hot running motherboard chipset or mosfets.



Installation

With the adhesive tape installation is really a case of paste & go. The only challenge is finding a suitable spot. If you happen to be using a Chill Vent then your work is made simple, just stick it to the side.

However if your case/CPU cooling does not allow use of the Chill Vent, then you don’t have to worry as there are other ways to install it.

I started out with the system pictured of the left, and checked to see if attaching the Cooling fan to the memory module would work.. as you can see, both alignments seem to conflict with the ATX power connector.

Madshrimps (c)Madshrimps (c)Madshrimps (c)
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So time for some thinking! I decided to stick the fans to the CPU heatsink. And after 3 days, it's still sitting there on its place, doing what’s it supposed to do.

Madshrimps (c) Madshrimps (c) Madshrimps (c)
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Test Setup

Practically everybody has a different case and/or motherboard so the amount of possible implementation methods is endless; I could just go ahead and power up the system I prepared pictured above or look for a more challenging test subject.

My eye fell on a small bare bone system I had sitting in the corner of my room; the case is crammed and bound to be very hot, so let’s see if this Memory Cooling fan can get installed.


Piotke's PC
SystemShuttle SS51G barebone
CPUIntel Celeron 1700 Mhz
Memory 2 * 512Mb Corsair PC4400 DDR


One crammed case with 2x DDR sticks: check!
Madshrimps (c) Madshrimps (c)

One Memory Cooling fan installed: check!
Madshrimps (c) Madshrimps (c)
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As you can see, sticking the “L” to the side of the memory seems to work perfectly in this case.


Results

  • Idle is just after booting and letting the computer do nothing for about half an hour.
  • Stressed temperature is measures after ~45 minutes of Particle Fury. A very CPU/Memory intensive benchmark.
  • Room temp during testing: 25°C

    This was the outcome:


  • No fans: idle / stressed
    Memory: 57 / 63
    CPU: 42 / 51
    Chipset: 40 / 47

  • With Fans blowing down: idle / stressed
    Memory: 37 / 40
    CPU: 46 / 57
    Chipset: 40 / 44

  • With Fans blowing up: idle / stressed
    Memory: 38 / 41
    CPU: 46 / 55
    Chipset: 40 / 45

    All these numbers may look very cool but I think they’ll do even better in a graph ->
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