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Asus mobo with heatpiped memory

Author: Richard Swinburne
Published: 6th June 2007

Continuing to set the standards in innovative heatpipe use, Asus is trialling an AMD RD790 motherboard, the M3A32-MVP, with integrated memory cooling.

Thanks to Socket AM2+'s HyperTransport 3.0 and DDR2-1066 memory support, the stock memory speeds are now higher, which could also lead to potentially higher overclocks.

Such clock speed increases mean additional heat on the memory so spreading it around the system is a great innovation. The memory is connected to the heatpipe array by big copper plates and is held tightly with adjustable bolts. This does look to leave only two slots available though.

The design means the heat is taken from straight over the memory chips themselves, however due to the permanent design of most memory heatsinks, and the fact that their heatsinks/headspreaders are non-flat (therefore leaving air gaps), the system has a lot of potential limitations.

Also, it's not until you start pumping more than 2.3V through memory that it becomes really hot, and we've only found the Kingston HyperX 9600 to really get hot when it's running at its limits. Both Corsair and OCZ make performance memory with specifically designed heatsinks.

In all, it's a nice concept and we're always the first to appreciate innovation, but we feel it has only limited use and careful buying advice is needed. Ultimately, we will have to wait until we get one in our labs to test with as many sticks as we can get our hands on, so until then we remain sceptical.

Tell us what you think in the forums.

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