Introduction

Back when I started overclocking my RAM with a few sets of DDR, the voltage those old TCCD chips could take was insane by today's standards and the heat they produced was sometimes unbearable. Then there weren't too many commercially available options to give the memory its own dedicated airflow. I do remember something referred to as the "crab cooler", but my efforts to find it now ended up with not being able to locate it. The need for memory specific cooling lead me to end up using 80mm and 120mm fans, rigged in my PC in ways I'd rather not discuss, due to their "ghetto mod" nature. Let's just say there was some picture hanging wire and a few zip ties involved and it really wasn't so appealing to the eye.

Today, the retail market has a few of these memory coolers on the market and I personally got the Corsair CMXAF1 when it was released as a standalone cooler from Newegg. There have been many others to pop up during this time, such as a second revision fan from Corsair and of course the XTC cooler from OCZ. We now have a new entry to this segment of cooling, this time from Kingston. They have been a long time producer of quality memory since the late 80's and it only seems logical that they add a device to keep their products cooler, hopefully leading to longer life of said products.

What Kingston has come up with is the Kingston HyperX Fan or KHX-FAN as it's labeled on the package. The KHX-FAN is a memory cooler that uses the power of a motherboard header or any 3-pin fan connection to spin the dual fan designed arrangement. I'm no stranger to what these types of coolers are capable of doing for memory cooling and first impressions of the KHX-Fan lead me to believe they have built something very capable of the task at hand. Impressions can only get me so far, I need the numbers to tell me what's what with cooling, so let's get to it and see what Kingston has to offer.