Following the announcement of Ultra Low Latency (ULL) EXPO memory at AMD’s Computex keynote, we’ve now seen the technology in action at G.Skill’s booth. While you can expect to find standard DIMMS sporting the new overclocking profile hitting store shelves soon, it’s the kit with active cooling that caught our eye.
Donning a black heatsink with gold accents, these G.Skill sticks aren’t exactly subtle about their premium status but the design stops short of proving gaudy. I particularly appreciate the ridged heatsink cut out, also coloured gold, as it brings a nice utilitarian touch to the otherwise boujee design.
Separating themselves from much of the memory herd, these UDIMMs sport active cooling by way of a small fan on the outward facing side of their heatsinks. G.Skill has developed this solution in collaboration with Cooler Master, in a bid to improve operating temperatures.
Unfortunately, it was impossible for us to tell how much noise the fans made as the noise of Computex drowned out any chance of sound analysis. Providing the RPM remains relatively low, though, the tiny blowers shouldn’t prove too intrusive.
I should also point out that the size of the RAM’s heatsinks and fans has a big impact on the size of each stick, to the point that two of these DIMMs occupy the four slots worth of space. This isn’t a huge deal if you’re only planning to run dual-channel in a quad-channel board, but presents problems for two slot motherboards.
Moving focus from aesthetics to performance, G.Skill had a Ryzen 9 9900X test bench set up with the new AMD ULL-EXPO sticks running. The company built this setup around an MSI MAG B850M Mortar Max WiFi, showcasing that the benefits of this new overclocking profile extend to budget chipsets.
Relative to standard JEDEC, the ULL-EXPO sticks running at 6,000MT/s with 28-36-36-32 timings were able to deliver up to 29% more bandwidth an AIDA64 benchmarks. More importantly, the new profile nets an additional 14% worth of performance relative to standard EXPO.
I’m curious to test the impact of the fans on this RAM, to both temperature and noise away from the show floor. Moreover, I’d love to see how much of difference there will be between these actively cooled DIMMs relative to passive ones while running ULL-EXPO.
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