Recently, I was lucky enough to pick up some old IBM Netfinity servers from an auction. Each one came with 2 gigabytes of RAM that I realised that I could use in some old Athalon XP PC133 motherboards.

The RAM seemed to work fine until I put some load on it at which point the screen would freeze and the PC would hang and need to be restarted. It turned out that while the momory worked fine in the PC - it would get progressively hotter until it caused  the computer to hang.

Obviously, I needed a cheap RAM cooling solution. There are a few around, but I decided to make my own from stuff I had lying around.

I ended up using an old 486 cooler fan along with a blank slot panel cover a bolt, nut and screw.

As you can see from the photo, it's not rocket science but it works well. Because the fan is not mounted in a very balanced fashion it will probably begin to make some vibration noise, so I recommend using some high density packing foam when connecting the fan to the case.

This kind of setup could work very well if you've overclocked your RAM and it's getting hot.

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