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.



As a base for Ballistix modules, Crucial use a black 6-layer PCB made by Levin. To provide the styling department with an additional playground, we have separate trademark yellow heatspreaders on each side of the module that hang on only on the ICs they are intended to cool.





Somewhere in the assembly process, each module gets flashed with its own SPD that features obligatory JEDEC profiles and an XMP, which are meant to assist the user with timing and subtiming setup.



Even though we do not advise readers to do this at home, removing the heatspreaders was not much of a hassle thanks to relatively weak thermal adhesive.




With ICs exposed and not fully relabeled, it is not hard to detect their maker and the model. Similar to its faster analogs, the DDR3-1600 version of Ballistix is also based on Micron D9PFJ meaning it should be equally entertaining during the overclock testing.

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

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