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I was looking into buying 2 sticks of 1gb of memory, and i was wondering what the difference is with the ones with the heat spreaders? I have an msi motherboard that takes 184 pin ddr memory and i was looking at buying 2 sticks of 1 gb 184 pin ddr 400 (pc3200). Any help would be appreciated, Thanks

I think the heatsinks are there for overclockers. I don't imagine they are necessary for normal users.

And in some cases they're not even good for that (if they make lousy or no contact with the chips or are otherwise poorly designed, as often seems to be the case), making them just bling to impress your friends or delude yourself.

Heatspreaders are generally good if you have a system that is running hot components inside. Its not just what your RAM does that adds heat, but what the components around it do, and how many volts you are running through the MB. Cooling also adds longer life to the components. Most of the better performing RAM chips come with heatspreaders anyway.

I think the real question is how warm is it inside your case? With proper airflow or cooling you don't necessary need heatspreaders, but they do help.