As you could see on Figure 10, the memory chips from our video card were under the GPU cooler. The problem is that on some video cards the GPU cooler seems to be used to cool down the memory chips but actually they don’t even touch them. So pay close attention on video cards where the GPU cooler covers the memory chips to check whether it touches the memory chips or not. You can see an example of that on Figures 11 and 12. The GPU cooler appears to be used to cool down the memory chips but when you take a closer look, it doesn’t touch the chips! In cases like this the best solution is to replace the GPU cooler with a high-end GPU cooler that touches the memory chips, so you will be improving both GPU and memory chips cooling.

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Figure 11: On this video card the cooler seems to be cooling the memory chips…

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Figure 12: But it isn’t!

Another case that you might want to replace the GPU cooler that comes with the video card with a high-end GPU cooler that touches the memory chips is when the GPU cooler prevents you from installing passive heatsinks on the memory chips. Take a look on Figure 13. On this video card the GPU cooler covers part of the memory chips without touching them, so the GPU cooler doesn’t cool down the memory chips and at the same time prevents you from installing passive heatsinks on the them.

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Figure 13: The cooler that came with this video card doesn’t allow you to install passive heatsinks on the memory chips.

Another trick advanced overclockers do is to play with memory timings. Usually increasing timings reduce the memory performance but allow you to achieve higher clocks. The trick is to check whether the higher clock rate you will be able to configure will really deliver a higher 3D performance or not – because of the increased timings, you may actually see loss of performance. Memory timing adjustment is done by editing the video card BIOS. We will discuss later how to edit your video card BIOS, however we won’t go into the details on how to change memory timings.