Crucial has been one of the top memory manufacturers for a while now, and their Ballistix kits are some of the best performance products on the market. Today I have their PC2 8500 4 GB kit, hopefully it can live up to the standard we have all come to expect of products wearing the Ballistix tag.
Provided By: Crucial
Price: $110.99
Closer Look:
Crucial packaged their Ballistix modules in a standard plastic sealed blister pack. The cardboard face includes the statements “High-Performance Memory”, “Limited Lifetime Warranty”. The back states, “Crucial Ballistix high-performance memory is engineered specifically for gaming enthusiasts and system modders. Featuring advanced speed grades, low latencies, and sleek integrated heat spreaders”.
The Ballistix modules use a full-cover heatspreader design finished in metallic gold paint with an aluminium silver surround. Printed on the right-hand side of the module is a black and red Ballistix logo. A nice touch is the black PCB, which looks rather extreme when compared to the more standard green that we’ve come to expect from other manufacturers.
Features & Specifications:
| What is Ballistix memory? The Ballistix line is specifically built for performance enthusiasts who want to push the performance envelope without worrying about data loss or corruption, mysterious intermittent errors and display problems, or worse — the dreaded BSOD! The Ballistix line of high-performance memory modules features advanced speed grades, low latencies, and integrated aluminum heat spreaders. What is a Ballistix 240-pin DIMM? A Ballistix dual inline memory module (DIMM) consists of a number of memory components that are attached to a black printed circuit board. The gold pins on the bottom of the DIMM provide a connection between the module and a socket on a larger printed circuit board. The pins on the front and back of a DIMM are not connected to each other. Ballistix 240-pin DIMMs are used to provide DDR2 SDRAM memory for desktop computers. DDR2 is a leading-edge generation of memory with an improved architecture that allows it to transmit data very fast. Ballistix 240-pin DIMMs are available in DDR2 PC2-4200 SDRAM (DDR2 533), DDR2 PC2-5300 SDRAM (DDR2 667), and DDR2 PC2-6400 (DDR2 800). |
Module Size: 4GB kit (2GBx2) Package: Ballistix 240-pin DIMM Feature: DDR2 PC2-8500 Specs: DDR2 PC2-8500 • 5-5-5-15 • Unbuffered • NON-ECC • DDR2-1066 • 2.0V • 256Meg x 64 •
Testing:
For testing memory, I run through a series of synthetic and real world benchmarks to ascertain the performance of the modules under their stock speed.
My System:
CPU: AMD Phenom 8450
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-MA770-UD3 (rev. 2.1)
VGA: PowerColor Radeon HD 5670 PCS+ Video Card
Case: CoolerMaster HAF 922
Stock Settings
The tests I run are as follows:
Everest read and write tests,3Dmark06, Sisoft Sandra bandwidth test, .
Sisoft Sandra
Conclusion:
The Crucial Ballistix PC8500 kit is a well performing pair of modules. It comes with some nice looking heatspreaders too which is always a bonus for those that like a good looking case. If you’re looking to buy a new kit of memory then I can certainly recommend Crucial’s excellent Ballistix modules.
