I bought DDR4 ECC sticks for my rig and they don't usually come with heat spreaders. Green PCB doesn't look good, so I started looking for some heat spreaders. Most stuff you can get comes with either RGB (those external cables) or is of bad quality. Thankfully dimensions of RAM sticks didn't change over the years. So I started looking at second hand sticks, where I could just strip heat spreaders and transplant them. I decided to go for Samsung DDR2 RDIMM modules. Those are cheap (around $1) and I liked simple industrial look of heat spreaders. I imitated Buildzoid (he tested temperature capability of RAM sticks) with hair dryer to remove stickers and soften a bit thermal pads. Modules I ordered did came with two business cards. I think seller was aware what I was about to do, since those cards came useful for removing clips (those were extremely tight). Scrubbing thermal pads took some time - those were rock solid after all those years. After that I cleaned heat spreaders with alcohol. On unrelated note. Those DDR2 came better packed than DDR4 I ordered (I was unimpressed by packaging as you can see in picture bellow). I needed some spacers for one side. Heat spreaders were stripped from double-sided modules. New sticks are single sided and had some caps sticking out on back side (I didn't want to crush them). I did cut some spacers and ordered new thermal pads. Bellow is final result. Maybe in future, when I get bored I'll look for different DDR2/DDR3 sticks that I could use as donor.
