Those are exactly the same ones I've been using in the setup I mentioned in post 12. Three years without them and without any problems.

https://www.memtest86.com/

Left of image is the heatsink, great for overclocking. and right is naked ram with no heatsink so if you overclock to higher speeds you can fry the chips.

if you only use the speeds out the box and never tend to boost them to 4 or 5ghz then you don't need the heatsink.

Ah, it looks as ridiculous as I thought it would. To which I go back to my other question, why bother when a system could only handle so much speed?

Systems nowadays can utilize the ram speeds fully now. AMD ryzen CPU's now support major performance gains from higher clocked ram. APU CPU you will see major increases of fps far past what you can imagine and when you boost the ram clock speed you can get more fps in game but it's only on certain games. On the software side of things, Adobe premier, video editing stuff can use it as well.

I overclocked my ram from 3200mhz out of the box to 4100mhz and seen a 5fps increase in games and 7 second increase in video render times.

but in everyday tasks you will never notice shit past 2666 or 2133 from what benchmarks say.

Here is an image of heatsinks done right.

Removing the heatsinks would likely void the warranty on the RAM. IMHO, they wouldn't put them on if they weren't necessary, it's just not that important for the RAM to look cool. That's the other part of it. If you have to remove the heatsinks in order to cram other things next to the RAM, especially if those things generate heat, you really ought to be thinking about other possible ways of handling things.

Removing the heatsinks if the RAM is completely isolated with plenty of room for air to pass by is one thing, or if it's in the path of a fan, but removing them when you're constricting the airflow and adding another heat source seems to beg for system instability issues.

Granted there are numerous variations here that can affect the end result, but I'd be hesitant when removing things like that.

Some would beg to differ. You can have obnoxious heatsinks that are just to look cool, or maybe you want your RAM to flash like a rainbow. It happened with mobos too.

I'd only advise removing it to people who very clearly know what they're doing, however I honestly can't see it being that detrimental to the RAM stick, if you absolutely want to.

Ran it, went through one pass and immediately seemed to start up another (I took the dogs out) - is that pretty standard? It said everything checked out, just hit escape but was running the second pass.

Also, I really love Linux - didn't even have to D/L memtest because my start up boot menu had the option to run it right there. I really should just start using it full time (I use it for some gaming and word processing - I wanted to be ready for when I have to abandon Win 7). The built in software suite has bailed me out several times.

I can't remember. I think by default it runs 4 passes.

Yes, it's normal. You only need one pass to ensure everything checks out, unless you want to stress test your module(s). MemTest will auto loop if you leave it running.

I wouldn't personally assume that those serve no other purpose.

The thing to keep in mind here though, is that the modules are being sold with the heatsinks attached, so they're being engineered with those heatsinks in mind. You may not notice a difference right away, but one of the worst things for system components is heat. And yes, it might well be that most of the batch of chips handles the lack of heatsink just fine, you might have been unfortunate enough to have the one that requires that bit of cooling.

And if it happens to be the case that that stick requires the heatsink and the enduser removed it, then the company would be off the hook for warranty service.

Your picture is so big in size because of the PNG format, which is suited for images with simpler graphics, tables, text. For photos use JPG.

I recommend PngOptimizer for anyone working with PNG files. Most of the time I paste my print screens in it.