OCZ Reaper PC2-6400 HPC Memory Kit (2GB)

Manufacturer: OCZ Technology
Supplied by: OCZ Technology
Street Price: $104 ($69 after rebate through 10/19/07)

by Dean Barker (10/14/2007)

Introduction

OCZ Technology has been building innovative cooling solutions for their memory line for several years now with tremendous success.  A few examples being the XTC Coolers and Flex XLC Memory Water Cooling Blocks in addition to their standard heatspreaders with construction materials evolving from aluminum, copper, gold and titanium.  OCZ Technology has taken the next logical step by incorporating heatpipes into their designs.  This heatpipe cooler is styled OCZ's Reaper HPC technology.  HPC stands for Heat Pipe Conduit.  A big thanks goes to OCZ Technology who has sent over a retail sample of their Enhanced Bandwidth Reaper clad memory for a us to have a closer look.  Let's get started.

Specifications

• (2) Matched 1024MB 240 pin DIMM units

• Speed: DDR2 800 (PC2-6400)

• EPP Timings: 4-3-3-15 (CAS-TRCD-TRP-TRAS)

• Non-EPP Timings: 4-4-4-15 (CAS-TRCD-TRP-TRAS)

• HPC Heatpipe heatspreaders

• Lifetime warranty

• Unbuffered

• 2.0 volts

• OCZ Extended Voltage Protection allows modules to handle voltages up to 2.2v ±5% and still be covered by Lifetime Warranty

Fear the Reaper

As we mentioned in the introduction, OCZ is no stranger to innovation.  Most recently we saw their oversized water cooled ready units hit the shelves.  With their pushing cooling in directions like that, it only stands to reason to push air cooling to its limit as well.  Enter the new Reaper heatpipe memory cooler.  As you can see below the principle is straight forward; an aluminum heatspreader connected via a 5mm copper heatpipe conveys thermal energy to an aluminum fin block mounted off of the PCB module.

  

There are a couple of markings on the unit I want to show you before we look more closely at the heatpipe itself.  The first is the label is affixed to one side identifying the memory and its timings.  The OCZ Reaper HPC units are tuned specifically for NVidia 680i based mainboards to run a very tight 4-3-3-15 timing set, aka EPP Ready.  For all other boards, the timings default to 4-4-4-15.  The other thing I wanted to point out is the OCZ logo centered on each DIMM.

  

Back to the heatpipes.  Looking below we see the 5mm copper heatpipe is attached to the DIMM along to top.  This allows an efficient flow of heat from off the aluminum heatspreaders to the heatpipe.  Heat is then conducted up to a long 'X' shaped aluminum billet.  OCZ claims this design nearly doubles the amount of surface area for convection over traditional heatspreaders.  From the looks of things, I won't argue.  Something else to consider is the DIMM's voltage.  The OCZ Reaper is rated to run default at 2 volts.  That's a 10% reduction from other high performance memory products from OCZ.  Are the heatpipes so effective that the voltage requirements are now less?

  

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