Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P and larger heatsink, blocked RAM slots?

[FISHRULE]

Hi guys,

Its been a while since I posted here. As you can see from my profile I am running what would be considered a woefully dated system now, so I am starting from scratch building a new PC for myself.

I was looking at building a cheap quad core socket AM3 system around the Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P, and maybe do some overclocking on it. I do alot of heavy duty Photoshop CS4 work, so I want to build a system with 8 gigs of RAM, filling up all the ram slots on this mobo.

I've read some commentary saying large coolers like the Zalman 9900 block the RAM slots on this motherboard when used. Since I haven't built a system since the AGP era of computing, are modern heatsinks really that large? If this is true I will just forgo a large aftermarket cooler if it means blocked RAM, since I'd rather have more RAM than a higher clock speed.

Please forgive the noobishness of this post, I am just really confused and don't want to waste my money. I live in the Dominican Republic so RMAing stuff is to expensive for me, the shipping would cost more than the heatsink itself. Thanks for any help.

 

[lopri]

As long as you don't use tall memory sticks you should be fine. It might be close with some big heat sinks, but I was able to install most heat sinks on my AM2+ board. (which is very similar to yours when it comes to the distance between the sockets) I have installed:

Thermalright Ultra 120
Sycthe Inifinity
Scythe Samurai
Zalman 9700
Noctua C12P

The worst case was with Scythe Infinity, where I had to install the fist memory stick before installiing the heatsink.

All bets will be off if you want those tall, fancy memory sticks, though.

 

[FISHRULE]

Hi Lopri,

Thanks for the answer. I've never been a big fan of fancy memory with big heatsinks. I am going for basic Crucial or Kingtom DDR3 1333 sticks with this build. I'll just set the RAM to DDR 1066 and push it upwards from there for overclocking if heat is a concern. I've never noticed a real world difference in RAM speeds over the years.

Now that I have this info on hand I will go ahead and order the parts off Newegg. I can't wait to get this PC project going. Its been over six years since I built a new system.