[Rant] Managed to get rid of the dreaded Corsair Vengeance RAM as well

Once again, Rakuten Auctions came to the rescue.

 

I wrote this once before, and I write it again. I had two kits of Corsair Vengeance 8GB kits (16GB in total) in my rig. Two kits mean, four DIMMs. For my SFF dream to come true, I had to get rid of them and replace them with a single kit. Sure I could sell one kit and just use one kit. That would definitely have solved the problem but I didn’t want to go back to 8GB. I had 8GB RAM almost 4 years ago as well. I should have 32GB by now. But hey, I have no need for that much RAM.

 

So, I had to sell the current RAM kits and buy a new 16GB kit.

 

When I checked the shops that I could sell the them, the most I could get for them were less than JPY10,000. At most shops, it was much much lower – around JYP6,000. Gah!

 

Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme cooler - installation experience

In the previous post I mentioned that I bought this super cooler and now it is time to install it. A lot of things happened while installing the cooler, so someone who is looking to buy this cooler might find this information I’m going to write in this post. It’s a long post, so read it all slowly, if you are interested in the topic. Important notes come up at different places, whenever necessary.

First things first. I had to remove the old CNPS9900MAX-B cooler first to get going. Since I reseated the cooler a few days back, I could quickly take it off. Then I cleaned the thermal paste residue from the CPU.

Then it was time to install the new cooler. Here’s what was inside the box.

		Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Bought the Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme cooler

I couldn't take it anymore. So I went and ordered the Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme cooler on Thursday before going to sleep. Before that I did some serious assessment as to whether I should go with this cooler or the Noctua NH-D14. Since the NH-D14 is a bit more expensive and the non-Extreme model is almost identical to the Noctua in terms of performance. But the new Extreme edition, thanks to its high CFM fans, can cool it much further. Some reviews say the difference is about 5-8C. Having that option is good I guess. Of course it will depend on the airflow inside the case.

But still I had to check 3 things before I bought the cooler.

1. This is a tall cooler, because of the sheer side of the fans and the heat pipes that protrude from the top. But on the official Thermalright Silver Arrow club page on OCN, I found several people who had cooler installed in the Raven RV03 without any issue. (Although the height of the cooler is 165mm and the max height of the cooler supported by the case is 163mm. I guess the protruded nature of the window helps?)
2. Will it fit with the Corsair Vengeance Memory modules? It was mentioned in a review that the heat sink itself didn't protrude over the memory slots. It was the fan that caused the problems. So what that reviewer proposed was that instead of having the fan in the front, move it to the back. Instead of push-push orientation, you have to install it as pull-pull. It should not hurt the cooling performance especially since there are two intake fans directly at the bottom of the case. But it was still doubtful whether I could fit the memory module closest to the heat sink fine. The Vengeance sticks are not only tall, but the sinks add additional width to the naked sticks. Anyhow, the worst case would be me having to remove the heat sink on the memory module closest to the CPU. I was ready for that possibility. But I hoped that I wouldn't have to do that.
3. Then I had to see if the VRM sinks on the motherboard would cause problems. I didn't expect this would cause problems but I had to make sure anyways. It seemed that there were people having the cooler installed on the same motherboard as mine, the ASRock Z68 Extreme4.

So, it seemed everything was fine, thus I ordered the Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme from Amazon. Price on Amazon was the cheapest. The price was almost same as the non-Extreme. It cost me ¥8,563. Hefty price for a cooler, right? Well, I think I should have bought this cooler in the first place; not the Antec Kuhler 620 AIO water cooler or Zalman CNPS9900MAX which this replaces. Those were the waste of money.

 

The cooler arrived yesterday thanks to Amazon Prime's one day shipping. But since I knew it was going to take a while to install the cooler, and it was too late, I postponed it to the next day.

 

P.S.

Do yourself a favor. Don’t get RAM with tall heat spreaders when you go shopping for RAM the next time.

The mistakes I have done when building my current PC

I'm sure you would say I have an awesome PC, and that I should have pretty happy with what I have got. But there are so many areas to improve and I could have made it perfect if not for the following mistakes I've made when choosing the components.

 

The PSU

 

The PSU I have in the rig is a Corsair Enthusiast Series TX850 850W model. It is very stable and has enough juice to power the system even if I add a 3rd graphics card. However, the mistake I made was choosing this series: the TX series. TX series has one *big* problem. The cables are non-modular. While some people might say modular cables are unreliable and such, but it would have been a whole lot better if I could remove those ATX molex connectors from the PSU. I don't need them, but they are there. I should have bought the HX850 which is pretty much the TX850 with modular power cables.