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Installation and Testing

Test Rig:

The installation for the coolers requires removal of the stock coolers. Many people may find that there is a problem with this as many stock coolers may be stuck to their RAM. This was a bit of a problem with the Kingston RAM as there was an adhesive strip sticking the stock heat spreaders to the memory module. After many laborious attempts at prising it off I admitted defeat not wanting to damage my memory and void the Kingston warranty.

After being defeated by Kingston I dug out an old generic DDR2 module with no memory cooler. The Xigmatek heat spreaders were therein rather easy to install. As the generic stick used only sported 512mb of memory; compared with the 4GB Kingston previously used; this therefore meant this acted as a large bottleneck in my system – particularly when gaming – therefore producing increased amounts of heat.

As I don’t have an Infra-red thermometer and there is not sensors inside the memory chips there is no real accurate way of measuring the heat differences from the different heat spreaders. Instead you will have to trust my highly tuned fingers as a thermometer (a crude method I know, but needs must).

The Cuirassier was the first in the firing line and using Prime 95 to load the system the slower speed of the RAM and reduced size resulted in a great slow down and a clearly noticeable amount of heat. The RAM was cooler than it would have been without the cooler but you still would not want to prolong the heat torture without a fan installed on the memory. Although the Cuirassier cooled the RAM enough for it to be within a safe temperature it isn’t really likely to ever be stressed this much in a real world test as there would normally be faster memory and less stress upon it.

Next up was the Dragoon. Using the same testing method the heat still increased but I could feel in the cases atmosphere that the heat was really being dissipated quite quickly. Although there was no real detectable difference in heat I would definitely say that I would feel a lot better having the Dragoon cooling my memory if I was going to be stressing it this heavily on a regular basis. I would also recommend having a fan blowing on the coolers to ensure the best performance.

Cost

Xigmatek Dragoon can be found at a plethora of online stores for the sum of £23. This is a fair price for this product as it performs relatively well and looks particularly fancy.

I could not find a price for the Cuirassier anywhere, but we will try and get a projected price from Xigmatek.

Related posts:

1. Noctua NH-U12P SE1366 CPU Cooler
2. Arctic Cooling Freezer XTREME Rev.2
3. Cooler Master Hyper N520
4. OCZ Vendetta 2
5. Xigmatek HDT-SD964

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