ocaholic - Memory > DDR3 > Crucial Ballistix Sport XT 2x8GB DDR3-1866 CL10 1.5V Review

Discuss this article in the forums [pagebreak]

Closer Look

As usual with Crucial, memory is served in a tray made out of transparent plastic.

The styling of the modules does not look bad at all but using blue color scheme instead of the usual black and yellow is a decision Crucial might regret since almost every motherboard maker has shifted their designs in gold-ish colours with the Z87 release.

Sitting on the heatspreaders via a strap of thermal tape on each side, the heatspreaders are just two separate sheets of thin aluminium. Given that these are relatively light and the surface is smooth and low in area, we have doubts whether these can make up for an efficient cooling solution.

Removing heatspreaders on Crucial has never been a difficult task. While the code in top left corners is a clear sign of Micron ICs, we can’t identify the exact model as the center of the ICs where this information is usually printed is occupied by a Ballistix logo.

The SPD of Ballistix Sport features seven JEDEC profiles and an additional XMP profile. What's interesting is that the XMP is not the highest frequency profile programmed in the memory as there is a JEDEC profile for DDR3-2066. That is some (guaranteed) overclocking potential right there.

Page 2 - Closer Look

Discuss this article in the forums [pagebreak]

Photo Gallery

Page 3 - Photo Gallery

Discuss this article in the forums [pagebreak]

Testing Method & Test Setup

To test the overclocking capabilities of the memory we are going to use Intel’s recently released Haswell platform. As memory overclocks are known to vary between different motherboards, we are going to perform the tests using two different platforms to be sure that our numbers are reliable.

Motherboard	ASUS Maximus VI Gene (BIOS 0607) Gigabyte Z87X-OC (BIOS F4)
CPU	Intel Core i7-4770K ES @ 4.0 GHz
Graphic card	ASUS GTX 580
Memory	Crucial Ballistix Sport XT BLS2C8G3D18ADS3CEU
SSD	Samsung PM840 Pro
PSU	Seasonic Platinum 660 Watts
OS	Windows 7, 64 bit SP1

Even though Haswell is very flexible on the memory frequency one can set, very few people actually do base clock (BCLK) overclocking on their daily setups. Therefore, instead of our previous procedure of fixing the voltage and raising the frequency in 10MHz steps we are now going to fix the frequency and minimize the voltage in 0.01V steps.
As usual, our stability method of choice is HCI Memtest. Since we are dealing with a 16 GB kit, we use eight 1500 MB instances and call things stable if we see all of them to go past 100% without showing a single error.
Not to get things too complicated, we only set the primary timings, command rate (1T) and the memory voltage by hand while the rest of the settings is left for the motherboard and SPD to agree on.

Results

In a typical Micron IC fashion, the Ballistix Sport are able to react to voltage changes all the way up to 1.9V. However, more voltage can only help to lower the CAS latency while lowest stable values of three other primary timings seem to only depend on the memory frequency.
That said, very few people are actually going to push more than 1.7V through memory using their daily setups and the lower voltage range is where things do not look good for the Micron. While it is possible to run our kit at DDR3-2133 with timings of 10-11-11-30 at 1.68V, the kit barely shows a 60MHz overclock using default timing and voltage values. Of course, one might say that we expect too much but let’s not forget about the competition which can produce more interesting results on modules of similar density.

Page 4 - Results

Discuss this article in the forums [pagebreak]

Conclusion

On the day of writing this article, the 16 GB version of DDR3-1866 CL10 Ballistix Sport is not listed on Geizhals so we would have to refer to US shops to make a judgment on the pricing. Looking over at newegg we start at a $130 price tag, which is $20 more than a Geil Evo Corsa kit with similar specs and only $15 below where DDR3-2400 rated stuff starts at.
With the spec being low, heatspreaders being simple and overclocking potential being very limited, the Ballistix have no special features to offer. Unless pricing is improved, it would take a very specific build for these to fit in; otherwise we cannot issue any recommendation.
All things considered, the Crucial Ballistix Sport XT get a our neutral mark of 2.5 stars out of five.

Award

The Crucial Ballistix Sport XT BLS2C8G3D18ADS3CEU kit receives our netral rating of 2.5 out of five stars.