Corsair: DDR5 memory will need better cooling as VRMs move to the module

[jsilva]

In context: DDR5 modules will be faster and hold more memory than DDR4 ever did. That's partly due to the shift of power management ICs and voltage regulating modules from the motherboard to the module itself, increasing the number of heat sources therefore generating more heat.

Many believe DDR4 and older modules do not generate enough heat to justify the use of heatsinks, but because of some inherent changes of DDR5 memory, it looks like decent cooling solutions will be needed. One such difference is the move of power management ICs (PMIC) and voltage regulating modules (VRM) to the module, generating more heat compared to their predecessors.

"DDR5 conceivably could run much hotter than DDR4. They have moved voltage regulation off the motherboard itself and now it is on the [module], so you actually could be pumping a lot more heat," stated George Makris, DIY marketing director at Corsair.

In Corsair's case, they will use its DHX technology, which uses fins to dissipate heat from the outer part of the chips, and another set of fins to cool the inner part. This technology was first used in its Dominator DDR1 modules and has since been used on all other Dominator series modules until now.

Also read: Anatomy of RAM

Now that DDR5 modules will include the PMIC and VRM on the PCB, these will need to be cooled. Corsair will probably take care of them by upgrading its DHX solution, but other manufacturers will also have to adapt their solutions to meet the new cooling needs.

DDR5 memory is already out in the market, but there's an absence of platforms supporting it. That's expected to change later this year with the release of Intel Alder Lake a.k.a. 12th generation Core processors.

Meanwhile, memory manufacturers have been showing off some specifications of this new type of memory, capable of reaching 12,600MT/s speeds and up to 128GB per module while operating at up to 1.6V.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/90699-corsair-ddr5-memory-need-better-cooling-vrms-move.html

 

[QuantumPhysics]

Someone should make a water cooling kit for DDR5 modules and M.2 modules.

 

[bviktor]

"They have moved voltage regulation off the motherboard itself and now it is on the [module]"

But why?

 

[Geralt]

Not more heat for me, thanks. With my DDR4 3333 Corsair Vengeance I have enough for my needs. Faster memory doesn't significantly increase the performance of a computer. Another marketing cheat.

 

[yRaz]

"They have moved voltage regulation off the motherboard itself and now it is on the [module]"

But why?

I was asking myself the same question, it's a lot harder to cool dimms than motherboard VRMs. In servers dimms are easy to cool because they are just positioned perpendicular to the airflow. This is a lot harder to do in gaming or consumer cases where showing off components is more important than functionality.

I'm sure they'll come up with some blower solution but that seems kinda dumb considering that they could have seen this problem in the design phase and made a fix for it.

Like, what actual reason could they have to move the ram VRMs from the motherboard to the dimms?

 

[VitalyT]

Not more heat for me, thanks. With my DDR4 3333 Corsair Vengeance I have enough for my needs. Faster memory doesn't significantly increase the performance of a computer. Another marketing cheat.

I use G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-4000, and when I switch XMP off in bios, memory speed drops from 4000Mhz to the nominal 3200Mhz, and benchmarks show a significant drop in performance. So, not a marketing cheat.

 

[hahahanoobs]

"They have moved voltage regulation off the motherboard itself and now it is on the [module]"

But why?

At the module level, voltage regulator on DIMM design enables pay as you go scalability, better voltage tolerance for improved DRAM yields and the potential to further reduce power consumption

 

[Cycloid Torus]

Maybe RAM VRMs are on stick so a failed VRM can be chucked.

As to heat, why are they clustering slots so sticks can be next to each other? (see video 7:45) Shouldn't they be spread apart?

 

[Top S]

I use G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-4000, and when I switch XMP off in bios, memory speed drops from 4000Mhz to 3200Mhz, and performance benchmarks show a significant drop in performance. So, not a marketing cheat.

Isn't JEDEC 3200MHz at CL22 the reason for the poor performance? A super cheap 3200C16 kit should do much better and premium 3200C14 kits might be very close compared to yours

 

[hahahanoobs]

Heat probably won't be an issue up until 6.4Gbps. Performance tiers will undoubtedly feel the heat. I haven't found any further writings saying heat from VR's will be an immediate concern. It's wait and see time.

I'm more interested in the DDR5 IMC's, specifically how the high frequency and 2x32-bit mem channels per dimm will perform and the resulting latency improvements.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Cooling is easy, stop putting stupid looking metal blocks on memory and make some functional heatsinks. I had functional ones on my SD ram chips back in the day. It's not that hard.

"They have moved voltage regulation off the motherboard itself and now it is on the [module]"

But why?

I was asking myself the same question, it's a lot harder to cool dimms than motherboard VRMs. In servers dimms are easy to cool because they are just positioned perpendicular to the airflow. This is a lot harder to do in gaming or consumer cases where showing off components is more important than functionality.

I'm sure they'll come up with some blower solution but that seems kinda dumb considering that they could have seen this problem in the design phase and made a fix for it.

Like, what actual reason could they have to move the ram VRMs from the motherboard to the dimms?

LITERALLY the opening of the article:

"DDR5 modules will be faster and hold more memory than DDR4 ever did. That's partly due to the shift of power management ICs and voltage regulating modules from the motherboard to the module itself"

The shorter the path from device to voltage regulation and the fewer interfaces it travels over, the easier it is to supply cleal power to a device and the better the load line callibration can be. DDR5's rediculous clock speeds likely would need too much voltage to be realistic if the voltage hardware was on the board itself.

Not more heat for me, thanks. With my DDR4 3333 Corsair Vengeance I have enough for my needs. Faster memory doesn't significantly increase the performance of a computer. Another marketing cheat.

"muh SDRAM is fast enough, you dont need DDR, that's just them tryign to steal your money!!!"

Even old games like supreme commander still scale with DDR4 4000. Strategy games make great use of higher bandwidth, and its not hard to find benchmarks of memory speed to show you that system performance is indeed impacted by speed. Skylake on DDR3 does measurably worse in modern titles then skylake with DDR4.

 

[Geralt]

I use G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-4000, and when I switch XMP off in bios, memory speed drops from 4000Mhz to the nominal 3200Mhz, and benchmarks show a significant drop in performance. So, not a marketing cheat.

Since the time of Edo RAM, I never perceived anything significant. Yes, benchmarks can show that, but in practice, my Windows continues performing like before. It is like NVMe's. When I crossed 1GB/s I stopped perceiving any difference with Windows. Now I move at 7 GB/s, but the sensation is that nothing significant happened really. It's pure marketing. Another example is 4K, 5K, 8K, etc. It's just marketing. Or more megapixels for the cameras. We have been cheated many times by companies.

 

[Bawlsdeep]

Yeah I will wait a few years before touching DDR5 anyway, early samples look terrible in terms of clockspeed and timings.

My DDR4 runs at 4000/CL15, no way I'm going 5000-6000 at CL40 or something crazy

Wake me up when 8000 at CL32 or so exist

Not going from top-end DDR4 to low-end DDR5

DDR4 sucked when it came out too, my DDR3 at that time ran 2400/CL9 and first DDR4 were 2133-2666 at CL12-14, this happens every time, no need to jump on 1st gen

 

[madboyv1]

Even old games like supreme commander

Oh, you mentioned one of my all time favorite RTSs, you have my undivided attention.

Speaking of that game, Generally my problem more lies when I get close to that 3GB limit (after the LAA adjustment) and the fact that SupCom does not use more than 2 cores/threads. Granted "multi-core" support in 2007 was a pretty wild thing to have but having (supposedly) all your sim calculations on one mega thread really put's a damper on things. I haven't played in a while though and There are some performance packages/tweaks I never tried so...

 

[Shadowboxer]

So long as they don’t lose the names. Modern RAM has some of the most absurd names in the PC gaming world, my last set was; “Crucial Ballastix Tactical Tracer”, it was 4 sticks of pretty run of the mill 4GB DDR3 1600. My current stuff is slightly less ridiculous but only slightly, “Adata XPG Spectrix D60G”. Also just run of the mill DDR4 4x8GB 3600…

 

[Rayneofpayne]

Someone should make a water cooling kit for DDR5 modules and M.2 modules.

"They have moved voltage regulation off the motherboard itself and now it is on the [module]"

But why?

I would probably say logistically its the ddr5 spec it is for actual better stability at higher clocks and the memory can better manage voltage needs rather than the Mobo running more efficiently at idle similar to what they are doing with 12vo spec power management.
This could be another blame California thing.

 

[Wereweeb]

This could be another blame California thing.

Buddy, the world is much bigger than your provincial mindset.

 

[Wereweeb]

Since the time of Edo RAM, I never perceived anything significant. Yes, benchmarks can show that, but in practice, my Windows continues performing like before. It is like NVMe's. When I crossed 1GB/s I stopped perceiving any difference with Windows. Now I move at 7 GB/s, but the sensation is that nothing significant happened really. It's pure marketing. Another example is 4K, 5K, 8K, etc. It's just marketing. Or more megapixels for the cameras. We have been cheated many times by companies.

Is there a lot of marketing bullshit going around? Yes. That doesn't mean it's all the same or that everything is just bullshit. This is the classic oversimplification.

MP's, for instance, is the wrong metric to compare camera quality. A 8.3MP sensor can already capture 4K images. What you want are bigger sensors that can capture more light.

"108MP cameras" are just 12MP cameras where each pixel is sub-divided in 9 in order to lower noise through AI trickery.

And for SSD's, the 7 GB/s number is for peak throughput. What you "feel" when using it day to day is the latency. Get an Optane SSD and you'll feel the difference.

No, you won't "feel the difference" between higher throughput and lower throughput DRAM when browsing the web. It's not the bottleneck.

But it's enough to make a difference when you're pushing your DRAM to the max, be it in games, video editing or CAD. And it's the advances in DRAM that allowed us to see 16 core CPU's in a consumer platform - and even then, only just. Look how much L3 cache AMD needs to make it work, how much extra money you're paying (In the increase to the CPU's die size) to have a CPU that won't get bottlenecked by the DRAM.

 

[Bawlsdeep]

As long as we don't get active cooling on RAM .. Seeing active coolers on X570 again, was enough. This has to stop. I don't want 40mm fans in my case like back in 2000s

Small fans always gets whiny over time, or atleast thats my experience

 

[VariableSpike]

As long as we don't get active cooling on RAM .. Seeing active coolers on X570 again, was enough. This has to stop. I don't want 40mm fans in my case like back in 2000s

Small fans always gets whiny over time, or atleast thats my experience

I already hate having 40mm fans on my 1U server because they're so noisy, and that's after replacing them with Noctua ones and moving the server into a closed space, definitely do not want them in my PC

 

[Bawlsdeep]

I already hate having 40mm fans on my 1U server because they're so noisy, and that's after replacing them with Noctua ones and moving the server into a closed space, definitely do not want them in my PC

Understandable, a friend of mine sold his X570 and bought a B550 instead because the fan ramped up randomly and was noisy

Glad AMD finally fixed this with X570S

 

[hahahanoobs]

Maybe RAM VRMs are on stick so a failed VRM can be chucked.

As to heat, why are they clustering slots so sticks can be next to each other? (see video 7:45) Shouldn't they be spread apart?

Current DDR5 modules are not heat factories.

 

[Cycloid Torus]

... a variety of DDR5's? Wonderful.

 

[kamisama]

Understandable, a friend of mine sold his X570 and bought a B550 instead because the fan ramped up randomly and was noisy

Glad AMD finally fixed this with X570S

Changing the fan profile in the bios was too much work then, makes sense.

 

[Bawlsdeep]

Changing the fan profile in the bios was too much work then, makes sense.

Made no change. The cooler exist for a reason, it will ramp up.

When you have a sub 20dB system, stuff like that will be a dealbreaker.