Cooler covering Memory slots

[Durixx]

Hello,

my motherboard has only 4 slots for memory. Unfortunately enough, they're very close to cpu and, as such, the cooler covers 2 out of the 4 slots.

The slots go like this A1-B1-A2-B2. The BIOS prompts me about 'Non-optimized memory slot' problem and recommends me to switch out A2 for B1. Unfortunately, I simply cannot do that since it's covered by the cooler.

How big of a problem is that? Will it influence the performance in any meaningful way?

Motherboard: Z370-A Pro
Ram: HyperX Predator RGB 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 2933
Fan: Fera 3

 

[ehmkec]

Can you rotate it 90 degrees?

 

[Darkbreeze]

The slots go like this A1-B1-A2-B2.

That's not how the slots go according to the manual, and according to 99% of current Intel motherboards. They go, from closest to the CPU going towards the edge of the motherboard, A1, A2, B1, B2. Your manual indicates that for two modules the population rule is A2 and B2. That means the slot one over from the CPU AND the one closest to the edge of the motherboard.

As seen here:

 

[Darkbreeze]

Do not rotate the CPU cooler 90 degrees. It defeats the optimized path of airflow from the front, where it is coming in cool, to the back, where the exhaust fan will dispel the heat that is exchanged from the cooler. Turning the heatsink so that it's fans blow from bottom to top CAN work in some situations when it is absolutely necessary but it is not a good way to configure the heatsink. In that configuration you will be using already heated air from the GPU card to try and cool the CPU, which tends to not work well if it even fits that way. Likely, it would not and would probably overhange the RAM even worse than in the standard configuration.

If THIS ^^^ is how you already have it, then that is likely your biggest problem, and it should be turned so that the longest part of the heatsink points towards the top and bottom with the fan on the front of the heatsink blowing through it towards the back of the case.

Like this:

And this:

 

[larrycumming]

If your fan is blocking the memory slots, you can move your fan to the back side of the cooler or install your fan a few mm higher up on the heatsink.

 

[Durixx]

Thank you. I've been setting up my coolers the wrong way for all these years! Turning it 90* helped.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Better late than never. Glad you got it sorted out.