Gamers and PC enthusiasts alike are all about 2 things when it comes to their gaming rigs – customization and optimization. The former is a show of aesthetic style, touting lighting and case mods to make it a visual masterpiece. The latter is pushing it to functional supremacy, augmenting their rigs by fiddling with core voltages clock speeds to get every ounce of performance they can out of their machines.
This kind of optimization doesn’t come without a price though. Making those optimizations means additional power draws and additional power draws means heat. And heat is a hard enemy of electronics. This can be countered by different types of configuration – Heatsinks on processors, fans for better airflow and cooling so hot air gets pumped out, and even heat spreaders that come with most high-end memory these days. In extreme rigs water cooling blocks can be put on high-power machine elements, letting the excess heat be pumped away through running liquid in addition to airflow.
Just a short while ago at PAX East 2018, ADATA took things a step further with their XPG product line by showing off liquid cooled RAM. A world first in consumer computing, the XPG Spectrix D80 comes with built in liquid channels running across the top of the DIMMs so that in addition to heat spreaders and air, the risk of overheating RAM becomes minimized as well.
We don’t have much on the D80 yet, but have enough teaser data to say that it supports Asus’s Aura Sync for customizable RGB lighting as well as XMP 2.0. But it is coming soon as the first all-in-one liquid cooled memory, and we will have have tons more info for you when the product is closer to launch.
