WHAT TO DO if you have designed a motherboard with 35-40W cooling capabilities and the chipset beneath that cooling eats only 10W? The answer would be to either redesign the cooling setup (and sacrifice potential overclocking capabilities) or cool something else.

Engineers over at Asustek's R&D Department figured out a way to add load to the heatpipe system by creating an ingenious RAM heatpipe cooler. As it was explained to us, 99 per cent of users use two memory modules only, so the MemPipe was designed with two memory modules in mind.

MemPipe installed on Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe motherboard

The thing is rather simple. take a very good, low-latency DDR2-800 or 1066 module, and connect it to either memory heatsink or directly to the chips (depending on manufacturer). The design is open, so it is compatible with almost every extra-height module, such as Corsair Dominators or OCZ Flex XLC modules, which was a very smart call by engineers.

Asustek claims this will reduce the temperature of DIMMs by 10 deg Celsius, which is rather impressive for a completely passive cooler. No need for noisy fans that sit on top of memory modules, rather it uses the already-existing cooling system on the motherboard.

MemPipe from below. Mounting it is a simple task.

While the firm's 790FX motherboard is the first one on the market with such a concept, it will not be the last. As the company spinner says, it all depends on how much heat is produced by the chipset itself. If Asus manages to modify the concept so it would run on X38's for a dozen dollars more (X48) chipset, DDR3 memory might get this interesting modification as well. µ