Introduction

In just the past two years I have seen many innovations sent to my house to have a look at and bring my findings to you. Of course, they have had great success with their new chassis and cooling entries thus far, but Corsair has always been a leading brand for power supplies and memory. While I don't have access to do either the power supply testing or even the memory testing unless I was to buy them for a build, I am able to have a look at the cooling mechanisms developed to keep the memory cool.

I know that most people who overclock don't consider that their memory is going to get that hot under stress, and with my first couple of kits of DDR3 I was in that boat. Doing the usual finger test under loaded conditions, I always assessed a cooler running temperature than what my DDR2 would run at. Times have changed and more and more manufacturers are pushing the ICs to either higher levels of speed, or tightening the timings as far as they can go to offer better performance to the end user. Now I run my memory pretty fast normally, and I tend to try to keep my DDR3 at around 2400 MHz for day to day usage. With that, I did start to notice the ICs were warming up, and double checking with my IR thermometer, I was slightly surprised to see 45° or above during the toughest stresses.

That put me on the hunt for cooling solutions for the memory. This quest led me to Corsair as I remembered using the old CMXAF1 fan with three 40mm fans in it. I had noticed the new GT kits were getting this new fan with two 60mm fans, so I went to Corsair to look at the options. At that point I ran across the AirFlow Pro Dynamic LED display that harks back to the days of the Xpert sticks that Corsair developed in the DDR days of memory. This AirFlow Pro is part of a three piece kit needed for full functionality, and Corsair has sent all three components so we could have a look at what the newest options in DDR3 cooling and display technology has to offer.