Closer Look
In Crucial’s recent fashion, all memory with heatspreaders makes its way to the potential customer cocooned in transparent plastic packaging that permanently stops being solid and protective once it’s opened for the first time.
Inside, we find
them, the ultra small Ballistix Sport. They're almost so small that it's hard to
take them out of the plastic box. It's like an original Ballistix Sport kit took part in
Joe Johnston's movie "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" and they didn't recover
back to their initial
size. It looks like that's how you make VLP memory! Joke aside the
modules features a tiny version of the Sport heatspreader on a green
PCB. The heatspreader is black with silver on the edges and with
Ballistix Sport VLP's logo printed in the middle of it on both sides. The Height
of the module is only 19.76 mm which makes it the performance memory with the
smallest form factor.
Removing the heatspreaders isn't easy at all because of their size.
But we are pros so we managed to get rid of at least one heatspreader.
Even if the
chips are relabeled there are a few hints that help to find the maker. Timings
fomula, rated voltage, dot on the IC, IC's size and the number at the top left
of the IC tell us that they come from Micron. Micron doesn't have that many different
4Gb chips so my guess goes for the D9OBJ.
Each module is flashed with an SPD that provides basic
information on the manufacturer, capacity, part number, serial number and the production week.
SPD is
also responsible for setting the memory up out of the box, for which it features
not three, not four but well seven JEDEC profiles and two XMP. The XMP profiles
were well recognized by both BIOS
and CPU-Z.
When you look at the two XMP profiles you might think they are the same but if you
take a closer look you will spot a tiny difference regarding the voltages. That's a very smart move from
Crucial, in this case motherboards that can't set a voltage lower than 1.5v will
still be able to run the memory flawless.
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Crucial Ballistix Tactical 2x8GB
Re: Crucial Ballistix Tactical 2x8GB
We'll see what we can do. So far, we're planning on publishing another "batch" of memory reviews this summer, after Haswell has been released. It is our intention to do future memory reviews based on Haswell setups, since we have hopes that Haswell's IMC is a bit better than the one you can find with Ivy Bridge.
