As you could see in 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; actually, they don’t even touch them. Pay close attention to video cards where the GPU cooler covers the memory chips, checking if it touches them. You can see an example of that in 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 when you might want to replace the GPU cooler that comes with the video card is when the GPU cooler prevents you from installing passive heatsinks on the memory chips. Take a look at 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. At the same time, it prevents you from installing passive heatsinks on 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 use is to play with memory timings. Usually, increasing timings reduces the memory performance but allows you to achieve higher clocks. The trick is to check if the higher clock rate you will be able to configure will really deliver a higher 3D performance. Because of the increased timings, you may actually see loss of performance. Memory timing adjustment is performed by editing the video card BIOS. We will discuss later how to edit your video card BIOS; however, we won’t go into detail on how to change memory timings.