ENTHUSIAST memory vendors here have been trying to find ways of attracting top dollar in an otherwise overcrowded market.

On one side, you got super-duper modules with, as our previous story showed, DDR3-2000 and above becoming commonplace - even in the high-capacity realm.

On the other hand, you have to introduce novel cooling parts for those increasingly hot metal bars inserted into your mobo's slots.

A-Data, which showcased some interesting memory and USB flash storage stuff here, pushed its own speed envelope by showing Vitesta X series DDR3-2133 CL9 memory on the X48 chipset. The timing is not bad - yeah there are attempts to have stable CL8 memory at this speed - but what's more intriguing is the cooling system.

Now that's something - if you look at, say, OCZ's setup we featured in this story, you got a myriad of smaller water tubes per individual DIMM. Here, you have just one huge waterblock covering all four DIMMs, and using the big 3/8-inch tubes by default - no down conversions here. This is the thickest tube we've ever seen on a memory cooler.

If you don't like to mess with a wet thick pipe, well A-Data has simpler solutions too. The firm's memory overclocking guru and manager, Steven Kuo, showed us a version where two small but fast fans are mounted in the place of the waterblock, supposedly still doing a decent job there. Now, when Nehalems come, they will maybe have to redesign this to fit in six modules on the new CPU's three channels, we think? µ