[Rant] Decided that I should get rid of the Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme cooler

In a previous post I wrote how I bought A-DATA XPG V2 16GB memory kit. Since the heatsink of these sticks is tall, I cannot fit them underneath my current CPU cooler, the Silver Arrow SB-E extreme. You might wonder why I bought these sticks in the first place. That was because the low profile sticks were so expensive, that I could still be able to spend less even if I change the cooler to a closed loop water cooler like the Corsair H100i. And don't forget that these sticks run at 2400MHz, albeit CL11. Plus, don't forget I still have my Antec Kuhler 620 AIO water cooler with me as well.

Just forget about compatibility with Mini-ITX boards for a second. The Silver Arrow is not compatible even with Micro ATX motherboards. It not only blocks the first DIMM slot, but also the top most PCI-E slot which is always the one connected to the CPU with 16 lanes. It doesn’t mean that you cannot plug the DIMMs to DIMM1 and DIMM3 instead of DIMM0 and DIMM2 and the graphics card to the 2nd PCI-E x16 (wired at x8) slot, but that’s not optimal, right? However, it could be cheaper than replacing the cooler.

 

Still, I think the best thing for me to do right now is to get rid of the Silver Arrow.

 

[Gadget] Bought A-Data XPG V2 2400MHz CL11 2x8GB kit

In the previous post I wrote how I finally managed to sell the old Corsair Vengeance RAM. I sold them to a total of JPY12,000. Before sending the sticks to the buyer, I had to buy new sticks for my rig.

I've written this before as well - RAM prices have skyrocketed in the past few months. So my options were pretty small. I originally wanted to get the ones with the shortest heatsinks. The shortest kit available was the Crucial Ballistix Tactical LP 1600MHz one, but the prices of it had almost doubled in the last few months and now were selling for a whopping JPY25,000 or more. They used to be around JPY14,000 few months back - ironically the cheapest kit back then. Current prices made it a no buy for me.

The other regular height RAMs were all around JPY20,000 or more, unless I went for the 1600MHz CL10 sticks which were available for around JPY16,000. Of course I didn't want to go for slower RAM than what I had before. So those options had to be cut from the list.

There were some A-DATA XPG V1 1600MHz CL9 ones for JPY16,000 or so. And then the XPG V1 2133 ones for JPY19,000 or so. But my eyes got locked to the 2400MHz CL11 XPG V2 sticks which were going for JPY18,817 at Amazon. Only thing was that they were a bit too tall. Not as tall as the Vengeance sticks that I had before but still, taller than  regular DIMMs. When I read the Kitguru review (for 2800MHz version of these sticks), I found out that the heatsink can be removed but they didn't go into detail on how to do that. But the possibility gave me hope. Not sure if I would really go so far. Removal of heatsinks will definitely void warranty, and these sticks have lifetime warranty.

Disgusted by the prices of the low profile RAM, I ordered the A-Data kit from Amazon and it arrived the next day. (Funny thing is that ever since I bought these sticks, the prices at Amazon has gone up by JPY1,500!!!)

[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!