Corsair Dominator Twin2X2048-8888C4DF

Dominator Airflow:

On top of the improved cooling design on the module, Corsair went one step further to ensure that the modules wouldn't overheat when heavily overclocked. As we mentioned earlier, convection becomes much more efficient when there is moving airflow involved. Corsair designed an airflow unit that fits over the top of the modules - it comprises of three 40mm variable speed fans.

It uses a three-pin fan header, but there is no PWM attached to the Dominator Airflow in order to control the fan speed. However, it does come with a tachometer lead, meaning that any recent motherboard will be able to control it via either RPM or temperature monitoring.

Normally, one associates 40mm fans with a whiney noise, but Corsair seems to have avoided that problem. While we don't have any specific data on the noise produced by the Dominator Airflow cooler, we can report that it was inaudible above other system noise. We built our system with notably quiet components to ensure that we would be able to hear the Dominator Airflow if it was a little noisy. Believe it or not, our ATI Radeon X1950XTX was the loudest thing in the system and that's one of the quietest video cards out there at the moment!

Corsair tells us that the Dominator Airflow will be available separately, but there is no word on when this will happen, and how much it will cost. The good thing is that it will work with any memory modules; not just Corsair's Dominator-series. However, in the same way that there may be installation issues on some motherboards with the Dominator modules, it is likely that there will be similar issues with the Dominator Airflow add-on cooler. Motherboards with the memory modules exceptionally close to the top PCI-Express slot or in the close vicinity of the CPU socket may not be compatible with the product.