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  • wolrah - Sunday, April 26, 2015 - link

    Years ago I recall someone selling RAM that had a plug on upward-facing edge on which a LED bar graph thing could be mounted which would display something about the current state of the memory itself, I forget if it was capacity in use or memory bandwidth. Either way I really wanted those.

    Temperature, eh, I couldn't care less about the "heartbeat" aspect of this but if it would slowly shift from blue through red as the temperature increased I'd find that pretty cool.
  • elavanis - Sunday, April 26, 2015 - link

    I believe you are referring to Corsair Pro series. http://www.anandtech.com/show/1148 I had 1 way back in 2004 and if my memory serves me correctly they would light up based upon the amount of amount of used bandwidth. I was hoping it would show the amount of memory in use and was disappointed after I bought it.

    I know Corsair later came out with another pair of memory along the same lines that could display additional information. http://www.anandtech.com/show/1587/5
  • MrSpadge - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    To be fair, memory usage is one of the most basic things every OS reports. Having this shown in hardware is of little benefit. Besides, any modern OS uses spare RAM as file cache. The memory modules have no idea what's stored in them, and can't distinguish between cache and memory used otherwise so they'd simply always show "almost full".
  • wolrah - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    "To be fair, memory usage is one of the most basic things every OS reports. Having this shown in hardware is of little benefit."

    The first ones, the ones with just the bar display, were released two years before the Logitech G15 made PC-powered LCD informational displays an option for normal people. Before that they were the domain of case modders and other geeks with too much spare time. Multiple monitors weren't really a thing then either, so if you wanted to see real-time stats on your PC while gaming this was actually a reasonable option.

    These days, yeah, it's no more than shiny things. Obviously you are correct about the usage aspect with modern OSes.
  • wolrah - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    Yup, those are exactly what I was thinking of. I had sort of combined the two, the ones with the alphanumeric ones were the ones where the display part was removable. Totally forgot those existed.
  • KateH - Sunday, April 26, 2015 - link

    Corsair XMS! I still have a pair of 512MB PC3200 modules in the Bin Of Parts. As I recall, the LEDs were hybrid activity+usage; the bar graph filled up to show utilization and the top few segments flickered to indicate heavy R+W. IMO that was pretty neat and actually useful, unlike this gimmick. Even in overclocked systems I have never been curious or worried about my DIMM temps, but memory usage is something that I like to know sometimes.
  • cmdrdredd - Sunday, April 26, 2015 - link

    Kind of sick of seeing these gigantic heatspreaders and heatsinks on the memory. Hard to fit large air coolers.
  • Azune - Sunday, April 26, 2015 - link

    I think the target demographic for those is most likely watercooling. You wouldn't see them nicely with a large heatsink anyway.
  • RaistlinZ - Sunday, April 26, 2015 - link

    Air coolers! Oh man, I remember those.
  • cmdrdredd - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    With the issues people have had with the corsair water kits I will keep my Noctua thank you.
  • juhatus - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    A firm contender in "most worthless innovation of the year" series.
  • coburn_c - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    Better make sure you have sufficient cooling if you get the red LEDs.....
  • Navvie - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    I thought enthusiast hardware was about big numbers, not about flashing lights!
  • bigboxes - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    God no... I swear the only time I look at the inside of my computer is when I put it together and for maintenance. Otherwise, it sits under my desk. Power users don't need these. It's a waste of money. I would imagine that teenagers and wannabes could stare at this for hours. It's like female repellant. "Hey babe, wanna check out my Heartbeat LEDs ram? Baby?"
  • Mr Perfect - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    I, too, came here to scoff at form-over-function bling, but the fact that they actually convey some sort of information is redeeming. It would be better if it was a little clearer though, maybe a bar graph that's green on the cool end, then progresses up through yellow and orange until it hits red at the hot end.
  • Gunbuster - Monday, April 27, 2015 - link

    These images look super fake. Wonder what they will look like in real life? Not a fan of the super man looking logo...

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