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

HANDBRAKE

Handbrake is a popular, free video conversion utility which uses H.264 video encoding. We test our system performance by converting a 1080p video which is 530MB to H.264 in an MP4 container.

Another newer addition, Handbrake is a really great way to test memory speed in a real-world environment. Once again, our Ballistix Elite seems to fair better than any kit we’ve tested in this benchmark, which isn’t surprising but is still quite impressive.

On a side note, it does seem like Handbrake prefers to have a good balance of memory speed and low timings, as the 2800MHz configuration fairs slightly worse than the rest.

PHOTOSHOP CC

In our Photoshop CC test, we employ the Radial Blur Test for measuring CPU and Memory performance. It works by applying a complex Radial Blur filter to a high-resolution image (4500 x 3000), and measuring the time it takes to finish the task.

Our Photoshop test always seems to be close, while performance doesn’t seem to stand out too much from other kits we’ve tested in the past, it does seem to be a bit more consistent across configuration, which is quite interesting.

 GAMING

TOMB RAIDER (2013)

For Tomb Raider, we tested the game on “Ultimate” settings with TressFX and FXAA turned on at 1080p.

Tomb Raider, always a favorite of ours, provides fairly consistent performance on all three configurations, with some slight differences. While minimum FPS is exactly the same, our average and max vary a bit by as much as 5 frames. Not a huge deal, but perhaps something to consider if you’re tweaking the RAM and plan on gaming a lot. Still, the memory in any configuration did fairly well.

CRYSIS 3

For Crysis 3, we tested the game on “High” settings at 1080p with FXAA enabled.

Here we can see that all three configurations provide relatively the same experience, with a light variation in minimum FPS, not enough to really be perceivable, however.  All and all, we found it to the kit to perform quite well in our Crysis 3 test. It provided a smooth gaming experience, and didn’t seem to hold back our GPU or CPU at all.

REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS

In our review of the Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 memory kit, we spoke about how much Crucial/Micron has shown their maturity as a company with that product, down to its packaging, design and competitive pricing. With the Ballistix Elite kit we’ve looked at in this report, much of that has continued, and then some. Sure, this time around we get a much more flashy “gaming” inspired design, but even when Crucial is going after the hardcore, enthusiast market, they still show restraint. The industrial-design styled heat-spreaders seen on the Ballistix Elite, rival that of Corsair’s Dominator series, and in our opinion look even better.

Of course, this is a memory kit we’re talking about, design is great, but what’s most is important is performance. This kit definitely delivers on that front, with some of the best timings we’ve ever seen on a DDR4 memory kit, and even some solid overclocking potential. Sure, it doesn’t clock as high as the G.Skill Ripjaws 4 we reviewed a few weeks back, but it does deliver much lower memory timings, and does so much easier.

With all that said, after using the Crucial Ballistix Elite, we can easily recommend it to anyone in the market for a high-end DDR4 memory kit. We’re proud to present it with our Technology X Gold Seal!

Check out the Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4 Memory Kit on Amazon Today!