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Tweakmonster Tin Coated RAM sinks Manufacturer: Tweakmonster by Dean Barker 12/16/2001
Introduction As we have seen over the past two generations of Nvidia video cards, overclocking your memory is a very effective and worthwhile way to squeeze some more spank out of your graphics card. Most (if not all) of the GeForce3 cards come with heatsinks attached to the memory. It was only a year or two back that the big search was on for smaller sinks to stick on your video memory when the overclocking community discovered the fact there were gains here. Since then, surprisingly, there are not too many manufacturers producing cooling solutions for memory; be it graphics card or standard system memory. Thermaltake entered the arena with their RAM sinks and heat spreaders sometime back. We have been very pleased with both of these Tt products. But if you want the cutting edge of memory heatsink technology for your box, there is only one real choice. That being the Tweakmonster sinks. Tweakmonster makes two varieties of these, standard copper and tin coated copper. I’m not going to get into how copper has a higher thermal capacity than aluminum. It is pretty much a known fact that, for the most part, copper makes a superior choice over aluminum for heatsinks. We got a set of the newer tin coated Tweakmonster RAM sinks sent over from our buds at Sidewinder Computers. So, thanks to them, we have an opportunity to give these beasties a whirl.
The sinks themselves are quite nice to look at. (You know you have been playing with your computer too long when you look longingly at a copper heatsink.) The design is pretty much straight forward; three fins on a base that is polished to a high shine. Tweakmonster’s website claims the RAM sink's base is within .0002 of an inch flat. From the looks of the sinks I have no reason to dispute this. Each Tweakmonster RAM sink is cut from a single piece of copper and then coated in tin. The nice thing about the tin coating is that you won’t have to worry about your sinks oxidizing and loosing that lustery shine. Installation When installing a product such as this you really only have two options. You can use either thermal tape or thermal epoxy. Thermal tape is quick, clean, and almost fool proof. If you screw up, you just rip the sink off and stick it again. Also there is no need to sweat shorting out your card by having some conductive thermal epoxy get on the memory leads. The downside of tape is that thermal tape flat does not perform as well as epoxy. Thermal epoxy conducts heat VERY well and is a damn near permanent stick. We recommend thermal epoxy but want to stress that you need to be extra sure and extra careful as you mount things using it. It is a good idea to cover the leads on the memory that surround the card with silicon to keep yourself from inadvertently bridging the leads and (if you don’t catch it) ruining your card.
We choose to install these beauties on our venerable ASUS V8200 GeForce3. The ASUS card is known as a great overclocker. With the stock sinks we were able to peak the memory at a whopping 543MHz. The V8200 has an all in one GPU/RAM heatsink so we had to swap out our GPU heatsink at the same time. Out came the Thermaltake Crystal ORB. Above is a before and after, of things slapped on there. The Thermaltake Crystal ORB and the Tweakmonster Tin coated RAM Sinks match better than you did in your Granimals when you were five.
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All pages Copyright © 2000 - 2008
by R. Dean Barker.
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