Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4-2666 Memory Review – Stylish Design and Exceptional Performance

TECHNOLOGY X TESTING PROTOCOL

At Technology X, we test our RAM slightly different depending upon the product’s marketed purpose, whether it be an entry-level budget kit or a high-end enthusiast level kit.  Our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide, however, CPU C State alteration may or may not have occurred depending on the motherboard and BIOS configurations. Additionally, we also try to include links to the benchmarks used in our report so that you as the reader can replicate our tests to confirm that your system performs the way it should

TECHNOLOGY X TEST BENCH

All of the components we use for testing are standard off-the-shelf PC components from major manufacturers, which can be purchased at a variety local retailers and online. We’ll also provide links to our components for those of you that find an interest in our equipment.

We’d like to thank Intel and ASRock for providing vital components in this test bench, without which this report would not be possible. Check out our review of the Intel Core i7 5960X and the ASRock X99 OC Formula used in this report.

BENCHMARK SOFTWARE

To test our RAM we’ll use a variety of benchmarking tools and productivity applications including AIDA64, Cinebench R15, WinRAR, 7-Zip, Photoshop CC, and Handbrake. We’ll also do some gaming tests using FRAPS to measure FPS performance.

OVERCLOCKING AND LATENCY TUNING

To test the performance of our Ballistix Elite kit, we’ll be doing some overclocking and latency tuning, to see what the best possible settings we can get outside of the memory’s guaranteed rated specifications of 2666MHz, and 16-17-17-35. 

Before we start tweaking, we’re going to run a quick AIDA64 ‘Cache & Memory Benchmark’ to see what our baseline performance is before tuning.

So now that we know what our kits base performance is, we’ll get to tuning it. After some time in our motherboard BIOs, and a bit of trial and error. We were able to get some pretty satisfactory results, actually outstanding, to be honest. By increasing our voltage slightly, from the stock 1.2v, to 1.25v we were able to get our memory timings down significantly.

At the rated speed of 2666MHz we were able to get as low as CL13 (13-13-13-33), which is quite amazing, as it is the lowest timings we’ve ever gotten at that speed, on any kit we’ve tested. It’s not all good news, however, when attempting to overclock the kit, we couldn’t get past 2800MHz, which isn’t bad at all, but is not as high as some other enthusiast grade kits can get to.

Here’s a quick recap of the best speeds/timing combinations we were able to get to for our tests.

So, definitely fairly impressive results, despite the overclocking issues. It is also worth noting that this is one of the most stable kits of RAM we’ve ever tested, as it took the least amount of work to get to these results. Normally, we’re used to having to do much more trial-and-error, with the system failing to post before we get to the most stable results.