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Product: Crucial Reviewed by: Antonis Provided by: Crucial |
It’s time for Crucial to renew their
Ballistix Elite DDR4 RAM and, as can be expected, this can only be seen as
positive for us. Faster speeds, bigger sizes, and with prices becoming more and
more affordable this makes the transition to Z170 or X99 even easier, and as
you remember from my previous review the Ballistix Elite was only available in
one speed of 2666MHz.
Now this has changed with the arrival of
the updated Ballisits Elite that you can also find at the starting speed of
2666MHz, but now also at two new speeds of 3000Mhz and 3200Mhz. As always they
are available in single, dual or quad kits, and in 4GB and 8GB DIMMs. Note that
the 3200MHz RAM comes in a 4GB DIMM, and will have to be 4GB, 2x4GB, or 4x4GB
configurations. If you need more RAM you should look at the 3000Mhz kit that
comes in up to 8GB DIMMs.
The picture bellow will give you a better
idea on what is available.
Big thanks to Crucial for sending me the
3000MHz 4x8GB and the 3200MHz 4x4GB kits for this review. You can find more
about Crucial and their products by visiting their website, here.
Now I can start this review, and as always
I will begin with the packaging and its contents.
Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4 RAM
Packaging
Let’s take a closer look at the packaging of
the Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4 RAM and its contents.
The packaging for the Crucial Ballistix Elite
DDR4 is exactly the same as the previous kits that I have tested and this also
applies for the 4x4GB 3200MHz kit.
The front side of the Crucial Ballisitx
Elite DDR4 RAM.
The rear side of the Crucial Ballistix
Elite DDR4 RAM
The information about timings and voltages
for the 3000MHz kit.
Also the information for the 3200MHz kit.
Let’s head to the next page where we
take a look at our testing methods and the review PC.
Test machine
For this presentation I will be using a
computer with the following configuration:
Hardware:
- Motherboard: ASUS X99-A
- CPU: Intel
i7-5820K @ 4.25Ghz (125*34) - CPU cooler: Corsair H100i GTX
- RAM: Crucial
Ballistix Tactical 3000MHz & 3200Mhz DDR4 - VGA: MSI
Gaming GTX 960 2GB - PSU:
Seasonic M12II 750W - HDD1: HyperX
Fury 240GB
(OS Drive) - OS:
Windows 10
Test applications
To test the performance of the Crucial
Ballistix Elite DDR4 RAM, I will be using the following test applications in
this quick first look.
- WinRAR
- AIDA 64
- Cinebench
- CrystalDiskMark
- SoftPerfect RAM Disk
WinRAR
We all know and use WinRAR, as it's one of
the best compression programs, but it also has a build in benchmark feature, so
I let it run for two minutes and here are the results for the Crucial Ballistix
Elite DDR4 RAM. You can compare the results with other RAM that I have tested.
The performance of Crucial Ballistix Elite
RAM is very good and the slower MHz kit appears to be slightly faster.
AIDA 64
AIDA 64 is great software. It can help you
identify your hardware, it can test your system for stability, and you can also
use it to do benchmarks. For this test I will be using the memory benchmarking
features of AIDA 64, I will be running the test five times and present the
average result. Below are the results for memory read/write/copy and also
latency.
In this test the result is excellent.
In the latency test the Crucial Ballistix Elite
3200Mhz kit gave an excellent result, also the 3000MHz kit gave a very good
result.
Cinebench R15
Cinebench is a real-world cross platform
test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities, and with
this test we can see if there is a difference in performance.
This is a mainly CPU intensive test, but we
can see that the 3200MHz DDR4 RAM has a small gain over the 3000MHz kit.
CrystalDiskMark
Crystal Disk Mark doesn't need an
introduction, it's a benchmark tool that I have used in all my reviews from
SSDs to USB flash drives, in this case it will be used to benchmark the virtual
disk that is created in the system memory. The size of the virtual disk is set
to 10GB using Softperfect RAM Disk, you can get it here, and I will be
running the test five times and present you the average.
Let me start by comparing the read results
with other RAM that I have tested so far
Read
test results.
Write
test results.
The Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4 RAM continues
to give excellent results.
Let’s head to the next page and see what
happens when you play with timings and the memory speed.
Let’s head to the final page of this
DDR4 RAM presentation.
Closing thoughts
The Crucial Ballistix Elite continues to be
an excellent choice when it comes to DDR4 RAM, which you can get in sizes from
4GB up to 32GB, with starting speeds from 2666MHz and moving up to 3200MHz. The
look of the Ballistix Elite continues to be very impressive, and the same also
applies to the overall build quality. Pricing is the only variable, and at the
time of writing the review you can find the 4x8GB 3000MHz kit at €236.39 in the
EU and in the US at $219.99. For the 4x4GB the pricing is €154.79 and $143.99.
All prices were checked at the time of writing this review from the Crucial web
store and as always your local reseller or online store might have more
aggressive pricing. It’s also clear the pricing is a little high for many
people, but we have to remember that this is the best product that Crucial has
to offer and as always this comes at a premium price. With that premium you can
also monitor your RAM temperatures using the M.O.D.
software. As always there is the lifetime warranty, and an XMP2 profile that
works out of the box perfectly, at least with my setup. If I am honest I was
expecting to have some issues with the ASUS X99-A motherboard, since the
maximum speed that it can do with DDR4 RAM is 3333MHz, but both kits worked perfectly
out of the box. I had no luck pushing them any further, and that probably has
to do with my motherboard, but overall I did not feel like I needed any extra
speed.
The final sentence is that the Crucial
Ballistix Elite DDR4 continues to deliver top performance, with great build
quality and also a very attractive look.
Both of the Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4
kits, the 3000MHz and the 3200MHz take the 'Excellent Award'.
You may comment on this review here.
