Aftermarket heatsink discussion thread

Hey guys, I built my first PC last summer wanting to make a great gaming machine, which i certainly have. However, I am really wanting to continue improving it now that I have a new job and have the money to do so. I have two empy slots of RAM, my other two hold 8g sticks in them, but my first two are blocked by my after market heatsink. Since this was the first computer I have built I have only ever had experience using the aftermarket heatsink, but i'm also quite annoyed that I have completely blocked off my access to my other RAM slots. I was planning on doubling my RAM so I was just wondering in your opinions whats more worth it? Double my RAM and install stock heatsink or keep it how it is now? 

tl:dr Heatsink blocking RAM slots, what to do?

Also, general heatsink discussion thread if you feel so inclined. 

As far as I know 16G of ram is pretty hard to take advantage of. It's also possible to simply more ram on 2 sticks and swap them. Short of swapping the heatsink entirely I don't know what can be done.

As far as I know 16G of ram is pretty hard to take advantage of. It's also possible to simply more ram on 2 sticks and swap them. Short of swapping the heatsink entirely I don't know what can be done.

pretty much this. I can't say for sure since I don't know what you use your PC for but 16GB of RAM is plenty for normal use/gaming.

I meant to say that you can always buy sticks with more than 8g a piece and replace your current ones, I could swear I saw 16G sticks somewhere.

Is the cooler a strange form factor? Mine stands straight up and blocks nothing.

Only real need I can see to have more then 16gigs of RAM at this stage is for a server. Since you said its a gaming rig there are much more important things you should be looking into if you have 16 gigs of RAM. For instance apart from very, very few AAA titles, most gaming companies don't use more then 2 cores of your CPU since they don't know how to utilize it yet. This means its better to have a good duo or something. This of course will likely change since AMD have got the next console generations license and are putting in an 8 core into the upcoming consoles which means at least in the console world companies will be forced to learn how to utilize all 8 cores. Also pretty sure I just heard that AMD released a 16 core before intel could... dunno how that will work out though. Im a big fan of intel since core for core they seem to run faster and at lower temperatures then AMD.

What heatsink are you using? Lots of them will have clearance if you use low profile ram.