Agreed on the internal appearance. A pimped case makes for great photos but personally that ain't my main concern. Besides I can always disable the blinken lights if they keep me up at night.
I do have RAM sinks, what comes from Corsair with the sticks. Possibly part of the heat problem I have is b/c Gigabyte set this board up with 3 memory sticks crowded right next to each other, a gap of 'bout 3/8" and then 3 more sticks crowded just as close together. Because of the width of the RAM sinks, each bank actually has less than 1/16" seperating each stick.
My case is a Codegen Briza. For an inexpensive steel case I was really suprised how much design went into it, and it took way to much time to find the thing, browsing thu case site after case site...
By the time I got to buying a case my budget was gone, especially after buying a pair of SCSI drives.
It has a fan intake at the bottom of the face, the standard rear exit, and a fan pulling hot air out the top. And because the top of the case is swiss cheesed with 5 mm holes, I could also turn the top mounted powersupply upside down directing the PSU's hot exhaust air out of the top of the case instead of blowing it down, right on to the CPU fans intake. It just took some careful patternmaking and drilling to make new mount holes. Here is a linky so you can see it.
http://www.codegengroup.com/03_products ... _search=22
Of course I ditched the 350w PSU that came with it....
I'm finding that with the heat that's coming off this thing, there's a watercooling system in my future, maybe something like biohazard's running but that's another thread (and another month or two of schmoozing my wife). In the mean time....
As for the RAM cooler, looks like the crab would be wide enough to allmost cover the 6 dims on my board (it's specs say it's 1 3/4" wide!), but I think just for kicks I'm leaning twoards trying 2 of the abit units first.
I called them and after waiting 25 minuites on hold I got a tech. He told me that their unit was slightly wider than 2 dim slots wide but couldn't give me an exact measurement, nor was he willing to have one pulled so it could be measured. He seemed to think 2 of them would work fine and cover the slots on my board. $11 bucks each after freight.
APOPTOSIS: (or anyone else so inclined)
If you still have one of the OTES RAM coolers in your possession, it'd be great to know how wide it actually is. Hopefully they're narrow enough to run 2 nested next to each other an get the extra fan capacity.
I've got roughly 2 3/8 - 2 1/2 inches clearance between my CPU fan and my main power plug for the RAM cooler to fit in between. In this gap is where the 6 dimm slots actually are, the slots themselves take a total of 2 1/8"
Thanks all for the input and taking an interest!
On the MB half I have 3 120mm fans blowing across the complete MB and 2 120mm fans echausting the warm air, more than enough to keep it cool................ 