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.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 4 - Results
Page 2 - Closer Look	Page 5 - Conclusion
Page 3 - Photo Gallery

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