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First Retail Water-Cooled DDR2 Memory Tested

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wed Mar 07, 2007 09:35 AM
from the everything-is-better-wet dept.
Hardware
Twistedmelon writes "We've all heard of water cooling for processors and even graphics processors, in today's high end PCs. However, a water cooled memory module is something that hasn't been done until now. OCZ Technology recently announced their line of Flex XLC Water-Cooled RAM, with its integrated heat-spreaders that can be connected to any standard water cooling system. The memory operates much cooler under load with tight timings at DDR2-800 speeds. For those with water-cooling setups, these DIMMs could easily be tapped into an existing system allowing for quiet and robust cooling for your system memory as well."
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  • zap... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mastershake_phd (1050150) on Wednesday March 07 2007, @09:37AM (#18261642) Homepage
    Ive heard of water cooling CPUs, GPUs, and even the Northbridge, but never RAM. Still I guess they are getting hotter too. The only thing I got against water cooling is it uses water, no thanks. Though I would consider using a non-conductive fluid. There is this stuff called fluorinert made for just such an application. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorinert [wikipedia.org] Its extremely expensive though. Ive heard Mineral oil works, then if you get a leak you just get a mess, instead of a fried PC.
    • Plus, if you have to dive really deep then you can saturate it with oxygen and breathe it like amniotic fluid!

      Of course, the following lung trauma is fatal. Still, vorsprung durch technik...

    • Re:zap... (Score:5, Informative)

      by NeoThermic (732100) on Wednesday March 07 2007, @10:01AM (#18261890) Homepage Journal
      You never fill a water cooling loop with normal water anyway. The two main reasons why is that first it's conductive, and second, it is impure, meaning you'll get problems later down the line with scum forming on the pipes and on the insides of coolers. Instead, the suggested water to use is deionized water, which is non-conductive* and doesn't suffer as much from scum forming (although many still like to use an anti-algae solution to combat the scum that forms.

      NeoThermic

      (* ok, it still conducts, but it has a higher resistance, and in computers there's few items that'll make deionized water conduct if it leaks. Much safer than normal water)

      • Re:zap... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by CreatureComfort (741652) * on Wednesday March 07 2007, @10:16AM (#18262064)

        Except that what really makes water start to conduct is the impurities dissolved in it. Have you looked inside you computer lately? I've got industrial grade air scrubbers running in my house (roommate with allergies) and I still get dust buildup inside the case. As soon as that deionized water hits that dust, I'm sure the resulting mud would be conductive enough to be devastating.

        On the other hand, we are getting closer to the point where everything inside the case that needs cooling could be hooked up to the water system. If we can add power supply and hard drives, then it might be possible to hermetically seal the case, and just cool the water.

        • If your water cooling system is exposed to the environment, it's broken. A non-broken water cooling system is *closed*, so the only impurities getting inside are the ones that are there when you close the system.

          Your house, OTOH, has windows, doors, and cracks, as well as at least one occupant who probably enters and exits through one of those things periodically. Even if you're the stereotypical slashdotter, your mom probably goes out to buy food once in a while. People who live in biodomes excluded, ho

          • But the situation we are talking about is precisely a broken water cooling system. If your water cooling system is, and stays, sealed, I agree, you don't have to worry. What most of us, who are unwilling to take the plunge to water cooling systems, worry about is the results when, not if, it breaks and leaks.

            If you have a non-conducting medium, it may be a mess, but not a disaster. If you are using a conducting medium, like water, or one that becomes conducting when it leaks, like deionized water, you
        • Actually, most household dust is just flaked off skin, which is pretty non-conductive itself. If you had metal shavings or something else soluble in the dust, I'd worry, but it's very unlikely.

          • Your flaked off skin has high concentrations of various salts in and on it. Back in the day, when they actually did experiments in high school chemistry class, I remember one where we used deionized water, a battery, and a light bulb to show that the water was non-conductive, then added salt and showed that it became a good conductor. That was the experiment I was thinking of when reading the GPs post.

      • Highly purified water is actually fairly reactive chemically, and it will slowly dissolve tiny amounts of material from the tubing, waterblocks, pumps, etc. Unless your system incorporates some type of water purification element, the water in it will be no better than tap water in a few weeks.

        Water cooling has been used for decades in high powered radio and TV transmitters, but such systems incorporate water conductivity monitors to check for dissolved impurities, and some means of removing them (distiller

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by drinkypoo (153816)

        Instead, the suggested water to use is deionized water, which is non-conductive* and doesn't suffer as much from scum forming

        Ordinary distilled water is close enough to nonconductive, until it gets contaminated of course.

        Deionized water is significant in that it is not only nonconductive, but it is noncorrosive. Water is corrosive because of ions known as hydronium and hydroxide (although as I am chem-bozo-man, I have no idea which is positive and which is negative.) Water will actually react with itself

    • Re:zap... (Score:5, Informative)

      by moonbender (547943) <moonbenderNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday March 07 2007, @10:07AM (#18261954)
      You haven't heard of water cooling RAM because it's a waste of resources, even more so than water cooling other components. RAM doesn't use a whole lot of power and consequently doesn't generate a lot of heat, a quick Google says about 10W. That's comparable to hard drives - the difference being that RAM doesn't really mind running at 50 to 80C, while HDDs do. DDR2 SDRAM doesn't need special active cooling, a somewhat ventilated case is easily enough.
      • Until you're overvolting your RAM to speed up timings just like you do with your CPU. Then you might want some extra cooling for the extra heat being created...
      • However watercooling the ram is useful if you are trying to have zero (or close to it) noise - zero noise means zero fans (preferably) so you need to get the heat out of there some how.

        You will probably also encase the hard disks in sound insulated water blocks and put the pump inside accoustically damping foam.

        Cooling is all a question of planning and know what you want to get out of it

        Cool, quiet, cheap - pick two!

    • Re:zap... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Phreakiture (547094) on Wednesday March 07 2007, @10:53AM (#18262514) Homepage

      It gives new meaning to the term "memory leak", no?

      • Not so (Score:4, Informative)

        by Gazzonyx (982402) on Wednesday March 07 2007, @10:51AM (#18262478)
        Clean (Distilled), water is an insulator. In fact, toms hardware inmersed a computer in water in their article Strip Out The Fans, Add 8 Gallons of Cooking Oil [tomshardware.com]. Just used distilled water, and not tap water - as you shouldn't be using tap water, anyways since it eats away at the parts of a water cooling system.
        As long as you don't have free electrons, you won't be passing current.

        • Re:Not so (Score:4, Informative)

          by modecx (130548) on Wednesday March 07 2007, @12:30PM (#18263932)
          Distilled water in a cooling system is no better than tap water. Sure, you won't have an amount of ions that will be signifigant to conduct electricity...for the first day, that is. The particles are still going to come off the metals that compose your system, and then you're on the path to being hosed by galvanic corossion.

          The key is to not using dissimalar alloys in your system. An aluminum block and a copper radaitor are going to cause problems, unless you use some of the products out there which combat. That's the real key. Pure water is even more corrosive than tap water. Ideally, you want your alloys to be as close as possible, simply for the fact there will be little electrochemical potential.
      • Oil on the other hand [boingboing.net] is a great insulator, and works quite well for cooling a computer.
      • Would running the water pump be louder than running the fans? I have some computers with fans that you can hardly hear. If only they had fans with seal bearings, so that they wouldn't start to make so much noise once they got filled with dust.
  • I can just picture Cray sitting on his porch in Chippewa Falls with a basket of DDR2-800 DIMMs and a coil of copper tubing, plumbing together his next home computer.

  • Soon enough. (Score:4, Funny)

    by shirizaki (994008) on Wednesday March 07 2007, @09:39AM (#18261666)
    We'll need water cooling for the water coolers.

    And then someone will get the smart idea to stick his whole tower in the freezer. Then nerds will become buff by moving around all their heavy equipment.
    • We'll need water cooling for the water coolers.

      Been done. There's a two-stage system on the market (I think the ad was in CPU Mag) that uses a Peltier device to cool the water.

      rj

      • Freezers are not dsigned to move a large amount of heat that is being continuously generated - theyare designed to cool a space then keep it cool.

        This is one of the reasons that putting a PC in a freezer is not a good idea. Asside from the condensation you need a huge chest freezer to even have a hope of keeping an average PC cool, even then the pump will be running at max so you will have a lot of noise and its likely to fail sooner since those ones are not selected for continuous running.

        There are much be

  • But how much does it really improve things? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JoeD (12073) on Wednesday March 07 2007, @09:40AM (#18261674) Homepage
    Every time I see something like this, I wonder how much real world improvement you will see.

    Sure, there may be a small improvement on a benchmark, but those rarely translate into something that's noticeable to the end user.

    Or is it really more about having the shiniest toys?

    • Re:But how much does it really improve things? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by penp (1072374) on Wednesday March 07 2007, @09:46AM (#18261748)
      To a lot of people, water cooling isn't only about the possible performance increase, it's also about the sound (or lack thereof). Personally, I haven't tried water cooling yet, but I would definitely like to get the sound of a buzzsaw out of my PC.

      As far as performance goes, I recently upgraded from RAM that had a CAS latency of 3 (Corsair XMS) to some that had more aggressive timings (OCZ performance ram) with a CAS latency of only 2. They were running at the same speeds (DDR 400 / PC3200), but at the faster timings the improvement was vastly greater than I had expected. After reading up on it some, a difference of 1ns can mean a lot when you're talking in terms of tens of millions of data cycles.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by moonbender (547943)
        Quietly cooling a computer is really, really easy these days. Two or three years ago, it was a pain, because CPUs actually generated more heat back then, but more importantly because silent computing is just mainstream these days.

        The power supply is probably the hardest thing to get quiet, unless you're going with a passive one. But you can also get an efficient one with a good fan controller, like a Seasonic, for 75 bucks or so. Silent CPU coolers can be had for 25, and while most graphics cards these days
        • But you're making the choice between "silent" and "high performance", because if you stick a lot of high-spec parts in your machine, you'll need active cooling of some sort. You can't cool a GeForce 8800GTX combined with a Quad Core chip passively. Hence, the water cooling allows you the best of both worlds. But it's all a choice.
          • No, I made a choice between silent and overclocking. You won't cool that hardware passively, but that's not necessary, you can cool it with a very low number of very slow fans. It's not silent - nothing is! even passive PSUs buzz - but it's as good as silent at 2 feet. I've got a mid-end system running that way, and my cooling hardware is just vastly inferior to what's out there: a Scythe Ninja was designed to cool dual Prescotts quietly, a Quad Xeon just isn't that big of a problem.

            That said, once you star

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by moonbender (547943)
            Not at all. Just replace the stock 80mm fan with a better (thermally controlled) one.

            Yes. That's hard. At least compared to just buying cheap, off the shelf quiet components.

            As for the rest: the doctrine at Silent PC Review, probably the definitive resource on this kind of stuff, is that 2.5" disks overall are more quiet than 3.5" disks and that current 120mm PSUs are more quiet than 80mm or 2x 80mm PSUs. The current Seasonics (sorry about the price, I'm in Europe and didn't want to underestimage the US pri
      • I recently purchased a fanless power supply, now I only have a fan on the CPU on one on the graphics card.
        You can't even hear the pc when your right up next to it, water cooling is a waste of money.
    • Marginal improvement in performance, with the possibility of doing serious harm to your system. This stuff also reminds me of the 100 MPG "vortex" air fans that you put into your car to improve it's mileage, or guys buying big rims for their cars.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by plover (150551) *
      Truthfully, it's mostly about adding shine to their toys. Once a gamer gets a frame rate of 72Hz on a 1920 x 1200 display, it's time to add all the detail -- reflections in the water, individual leaves on the trees, beads of sweat on the character's forehead, that sort of thing.

      There are also the people who do serious work who might notice a boost in productivity: they might be able to render movie frames faster, or compile a project with 10 million lines in an hour instead of 70 minutes. Of course peo

      • But I doubt that professionals doing intensive tasks like you mentioned would be bothering to overclock systems or rig up water cooling. They'd be more likely just to buy a powerful server or cluster and have a system that was designed for that kind of load instead of tweaking a PC.

        • Re:But how much does it really improve things? (Score:4, Informative)

          by plover (150551) * on Wednesday March 07 2007, @10:49AM (#18262446) Homepage Journal
          True, I'd never trust our build cluster to a bunch of potentially unstable, home-made overclocked Franken-PCs. And even if I would, I seriously doubt management would agree with me. They'd have one of two stock answers: "we'll add another server to the cluster" or "there's no money in the budget, live with it."

          No extra credit points for figuring out which answer we'll get this year.

          However, I will say that the recent set of Dell workstations we got in technically use water cooling. The heat sinks use heat pipes to passively transfer the heat from the CPU up to the large copper radiator fins, and the heat pipes most likely use water as their internal cooling fluid.

    • These radiators add at least 1.4 inch to your e-penis length.
    • Everything that goes in a server eventually trickles down to desktop. Right now servers are using buffered DDR2. Especially, the ram data lines are converted into a type of packet serial data on a special chip on the ram stick. At close to 1066mhz, these things get hot. Like burn your fingers hot. (Know from experience)

      Eventually, we will have to go with buffered DDR2, because you don't get as bad signal degrading after 4gigs. (Only systems I know of that support 64gigs of ram, without special riser
      • "trickles down" is perhaps a poor choice of metaphor when you're talking about water cooling.

  • I love the smell of Slashvertisement in the mornin (Score:5, Insightful)

    by beavis88 (25983) on Wednesday March 07 2007, @09:42AM (#18261702)
    This is has been done for awhile. Yes, perhaps not DDR2 and memory/waterblock made by the same company, but in my mind, that's the least newsworthy part of this whole endeavor. Nothing to see here (except an OCZ ad), move along...

  • Beg pardon? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I water-cooled for years, CPU and northbridge, and I can tell you that water-cooling RAM has been done for several years now using home made water blocks. This MAY be the first retail block from a memory company but there is certainly nothing groundbreaking about that.
    Water-cooling RAM has always struck me as a lot of work for little to any performance return. Plus it's one more thing to go wrong. I never lost a component in 4 years of doing this but it was such a pain to install and maintain. I can onl
  • Unfortunately, these are useless. I can get more than adequate air-cooling in a case that these would fit in. Where water cooling would be useful is inside a 1U server case and these are too tall.
  • Sounds like both Thermaltake (Aqua RX) and Koolance didn't hear the news. Oh wait, thats because they've had blocks out for a while.......

  • Dunk the motherboard into a mineral oil bath and use a pump to move it around.

  • Does this host water system ship with Starbucks or Nabob?
  • At what point will manufacturers start making components with water cooling builtin?

    I see a CPU that does not have a heat spreader. Instead it comes with two connectors for plumbing and the water channels are built inside the chip. Same goes for graphics and whatever else needs cooling.

    Cases will have space in them for a cooling unit and pump. Plumbing lines will be as prevelent as power connectors. You will buy "Hyper-Gamma Computer Coolent(TM)" from your local geek shop. And it glows in the dark so you

    • The reason we need cooling so much is because of the heat is WASTE.

      We only started to need CPU fans with 486s and up.

      They need to just prevent the waste in the first place like they are currently tying to do and the problem will go away, without liquid cooling.
      • Right then. Hope you're happy with your 286's performance then. And make sure you don't drive a car, or even ride public transit, as all those emissions of hot gases are just a waste. Or sit in a heated building in winter or cooled building in the summer, because it'd be much less wasteful to have the inside the same temperature as the outside. Or use a CRT television or monitor, as those use much more energy than an LCD.

        What you refer to as "waste" is simply a by-product of adding more energy to the
  • You know how hot and sweaty people get after about 20 minutes of playing DDR? My local arcade has these huge fans next to their machine, it's about time they came up with a better solution...
  • ooooooh! A copper tube soldered to a bent piece of metal! Call the networks!

    Seriously, Seymour Cray's cooling guy did this in 1962. The hot and fast RAM of that era was a 4K by 12 bit module, about the size and weight of three bricks, and costing about $15K each. These needed a 1/2 inch thick aluminum heat spreader, bolted to a thick aluminum frame with chilled freon running thru it.

    ... and you don't get much of a speedup by cooling your RAM. Silicon speed is close to PTAT (Proportional to Absol

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Aladrin (926209)
      Sounds like someone's a little jealous.

      Are they hurting you in any way? No.

      Are they driving the industry that makes computer products better and better? Yes.

      Does having better products every year help you? Yes.

      Seriously, just let them have their fun. Most of us can't afford to spend the mega-bucks on things that don't matter, but these people can, and they enjoy it. Let them have their fun while they inadvertently make the world a better place.

      Besides, I'm sure you have some hobby that most people thin

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