The NHD-15 was too big for all my RAM. At the time I had to do some deep digging and eventually found the NH-U14 which, I later discovered, had to be special ordered from Austria. So I gave the fat boy (the NHD-15) to my wife and she runs the coolest and quietest case in the house @ 34°C when actively gaming. That was the only way I could get viable air cooling with both banks of RAM running plus use the obnoxious Corsair RAM FANS that came with very hot running 2666 MHz Dominator RAM. I'm sure Corsair has improved on RAM temps by now as other companies certainly have. I don't use the broken Corsair software for the fans. I found a way to make them stay blue and left them like that. I would say that Corsair needs to stay out of the software business and stick to hardware. Corsair software is an absolute night mare. I also removed their bloatware from my PSU.
I don't nearly get the cooling the wife gets with the NHD-15 but I hover at around 40° C when active which is still safe and good for a work station.
For the time being I'll probably just stick with the stock cooler on the mainboard ;-) Normally I like to wait until the warranties have dissipated before making any major modifications. AMD used to be very sticky about that sort of thing but times have changed, I suppose. I've read that the stock cooler is pretty good. There's only one way to know for sure, huh? As for timings on the RAM as long as I can put it into XMP and it works that should be good enough for now. All the tweaking, I'm hoping, will come next year. The reasons I got that stuff instead of the more popular G-Skill are as follows:
1) RGB on RAM really doesn't do it for me. I've read hundreds of complaints from users about the RGB on their RAM not working right, out-right failing, generating conflicts and misbehaving. Maybe RGB shouldn't be on RAM at all? After all, it's one more thing to go wrong that isn't even essential to performance and serves no other purpose than eye candy. Knowing my personal tastes I'd likely shut down all the strobing, breathing, flashing, rippling, effects anyway and make it a solid colour. Even then, in two or three years down the line what assurance do I have that an LED or two or three won't fail? Is G-SKILL really going to lifetime warranty those LEDS? I have my doubts. Neo looks purdee but I think it's purdee stupid to put LEDs in RAM like that.
2) Samsung B-die. The new Ryzen 3000 series probably doesn't deem it essential and I'm not suggesting earlier versions did either; but Samsung B-die has been tried and tested consistently and is found to be among the most stable in its class. That Corsair botched B-die is very telling but aside from Corsair manufacturing garbage RAM I don't think Samsung is to blame for this. If I'm going to want tight timings later on in the game I think this is my best choice – especially if it is high performance RAM. If I can get true, 3600 MHz out of this at some decent timings in the future then I will have succeeded. Anything over 3200 MHz will keep me smiling I'm sure. The wife's RipJaw stuff impresses the crap out of me every time I sit down and play around on her PC and all I did with it is XMP the stuff.
3) Architecture. This RAM is so well heat-sinked. I would think at those frequencies it probably gets pretty hot. The RAM has a refined discrete design (which suits my tastes) and likely needs no external fans to keep it cool. I've already touched on the B-die so I'll leave it at that. I love the look of this RAM.
4) Price. If I'm going to shell out over $300 CA for RAM I want to make sure I'm getting good value for the money. In this case the bang for the buck ratio was so good I bought two sets of the stuff. Yup. This is an act of faith. I've never used Team-T-Force before. I've usually run with the brand names like Corsair, G-Skill, and Kingston. I'm still a big Hyper X fan but alas, Kingston could not provide me the RAM with all the specs I needed this time and I couldn't find the timings I wanted at the frequencies I hoped for. Anything close to it was outrageously over-priced or simply not available. So I decided to check out the new kid in town. This leads me to my final point.
5) Rave reviews on the RAM. This is a good thing. It's even a better thing when you find them from people who evidently know what they're doing. Myself, I'm not new to over clocking but I am new to o.c. RAM. For me it's just plug in the RAM, enable XMP, plug in more RAM if needed. Train if needed. That's the extent of it for me. I may have to learn something new here. Hopefully the fine people here can teach an old dawg some new tricks. Seems to me there's a great team working here, volunteering their time and experience, at Tech Power Up. Seems I've come to the right place.
Thank you all for helping me with my new AMD build.
<< OLD DAWG here.
Actually, that's why I was so easily swayed from my original choice of 3200 which is a huge jump already compared to my Corsair Dominator RAM (then again that's 8 DIMMS on a work station so it's comparing apples and oranges). Still it's those low latency timings that get me every time. Perhaps I really should move out of my comfort zone and do something crazy.
