Tom's Hardware's AMA With G.Skill, In Its Entirety

Heat Spreader Design, LN2 Cooling, And Thermal Monitoring

Q. Most if not all of your ram kits have a more aggressive look or "gamer-esque".Many people who would just like a plain and elegant kit of memory to keep their overall system more subtle looking. Have you ever decided to release a kit with more elegant heatspreaders?

A. The G.Skill Ares and ECO series can fall into that category of a more subtle, elegant looking memory kit. The G.Skill Ares series is one of our latest designs that comes in a 33mm heatspreader with frequencies reaching up to DDR3-2400. Several models have an aggressive look or color because that is generally what extreme users prefer in their extreme build. For the future, we will definitely consider fresh colors and designs to provide a distinctive product. The creative team is always coming up with unique looks, so definitely be on the lookout for the latest G.Skill heatspreader designs.

Q. What other parts you guys make other than RAM? Do you guys have any plans to make other component?

A. As of now, in addition to DRAM, we have SSD and microSD flash products available. We are currently designing and working on several component parts, so you should hear about them very soon. We are always looking to innovative and produce quality hardware for users. Expect great things in the New Year, there will be cutting-edge products by G.Skill.

Q. Based on what you've seen in the lab from DDR4 memory, will enthusiasts be excited about the next generation of high-end desktops or is its tweakability limited?

A. Since DDR4 is still under development, the tweakability is not yet finalized. We're hoping it will provide enough tweakability to allow extreme memory overclocks and break more world records.

Q. Is there any non-ECC reasonable priced ram available that has a thermo sensor in it? If not, have you heard of anything in the upcoming ddr4 to point towards this being in the standard? Currently ram is the only major pc component, in the mainstream, that does not consistently have temperature monitoring available. Is this something you would be interested in pushing for?

A. Unfortunately, no, if there were non-ECC memory with a thermal sensor, then it would most likely have a premium attached to it. DDR4 doesn’t seem to change this fact.Thermal sensors on memory modules tend to be on memory used on servers, where they need to be alerted of any temperature spikes to preserve data integrity and maintain uptime.However, that’s not the case for gaming, overclocking, or consumer PC systems. Therefore, adding on a thermal sensor is an extraneous feature that isn’t useful for most people.We find that it’s just easier to use an infrared thermometer gun for temperature reading during overclocking or testing.

Q. What's the most radical cooling solution G.SKILL has tested on your memory?

A. We typically use only two types of memory cooling: air and LN2. Air, because that's the most common cooling solution, and that we have to ensure all our memory kits are able to withstand its temperature under its operating environment with just cooling on air.LN2 (liquid nitrogen), because that’s just one of the most commonly available liquid gas available to lower temperature for overclocking. (There was an interesting incident involving a broken AC system, and LN2 was used to cool down the office that day.) We don’t use water cooling. And we haven’t tried cooking oil. Yet.

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Thanks again to all for making this a great success!

-The Tom’s Hardware Community Team