Friday, 25 July 2008. 03:31 GMT
Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2-800 PC2-6400 4Gb kit
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 Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2-800 4Gb kit
Manufacturer Crucial
Category Memory
Size 4Gb Kit (2Gb x 2)
Spec DDR2-800 / PC2-6400
Editor Winston Chim
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" These Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2-800 4Gb Kit are without doubt, one of my favourite memory product of the year, and I fully recommend them. "

 

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Crucial's latest Ballistix Tracer now comes in a 4Gb Kit ... Enthusiasts will love it

 

INTRODUCTION

Micron Technology is the parent company of Crucial, and over the past few months they've busy re-affirming its market position with its other subsiduary ... Lexar Media, who specialises in memory products such as flash memory, SD cards, USB pen drives, solid state drives and card readers. Here's a little blurb taken from Crucial's website ...

"A wholly owned subsidiary of Micron Technology, Inc., Lexar Media, Inc., Crucial Technology boasts one of the most comprehensive offerings of memory product lines in the industry. We deliver high-quality, award-winning products in every memory category: USB flash drives, all popular form factors of memory cards, DRAM computer memory for PCs and Mac systems, and solid state drives (SSD).

Our Crucial brand reflects our status as the only consumer memory upgrade supplier that's part of a major DRAM manufacturer. We sell high-quality memory that has been qualified and approved by most major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). The Crucial.com website features innovative online tools and an intuitive design that makes it easy to find compatible memory and recommended upgrades. And because we carry over 35,000 upgrades for more than 250,000 systems, we've got options for nearly every system out there. "

 

Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2-800

 

Moving back to desktop memory, Crucial have always been very good when it comes to high performance memory. Their standard Ballistix memory for both DDR2 and DDR3 ram, have won numerous awards Worldwide. Now they've just released their latest Ballistix Tracer 4Gb kits. It comes in the form of 2 x 2Gb modules, and it's their largest in the Ballistix Tracer series. These modules are really designed and aimed at the enthusiast market, which Crucial have been trying to expand on ... and it looks they've hit the nail on the head. These are the type of memory modules enthusiasts would love to ave in their systems ... me included. In all the Crucial memory we've tested in the past, we know that Micron Technology (their parent company) have been supplying the majority of memory ICs for their memory modules. The same memory ICs found on some of modules produced by Corsair, OCZ and even Kingston. This indicates that the quality, performance and stability of most Crucial memory, is without a doubt ... second to none.

 

The labelling and classification of DDR2 memory can be a little confusing at times. OK, I'll try and give you some DDR2 terminology ... More information can be found HERE

  •  - PC2-4200 : DDR2-533 : 133FSB : 266Mhz
  •  - PC2-5300 : DDR2-667 : 166FSB : 333Mhz
  •  - PC2-6400 : DDR2-800 : 200FSB : 400Mhz
  •  - PC2-8000 : DDR2-1000 : 250FSB : 500Mhz ** 
  •  - PC2-8500 : DDR2-1066 : 266FSB : 533Mhz
  •  - PC2-9200 : DDR2-1133: 283FSB : 566Mhz **
  •  - PC2-10000 : DDR2-1200 : 300FSB : 600Mhz **

    ** Unofficial DDR2 specifications

 

In this review, our CPU3D review team will be taking a look at these Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2-800 4Gb Kits. Each module are rated at DDR2-800 and runs at 400Mhz, and offers very good memory timings of 4-4-4-12.  These modules also offer EPP (enhanced memory profile) support, which enables easy memory configuration without having to manually adjust BIOS settings.

The original Ballistix Tracer 1Gb modules had a black PCB and black heatspreaders. Now just to be different, Crucial decided to feature a red PCB and red integrated heat spreaders for their new Tracer modules. There's also two rows of eight "chasing" red LEDs at the top of the module, circulating in a random pattern based on memory utilization. They look really impressive, espeically when the system is at full load.

 

 Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2-800            Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2-800

 

In our tests we'll bee installing these modules on a Gigabyte GA-P35 DS4 motherboard, along with an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor and a Radeon HD3870 512Mb DDR4 graphics card, running Windows Vista. During the tests, we'll also see how well they can overclock.

I'm expecting these modules to produce some good scores during our benchmarks. And with the knowledge that the memory ICs used in these modules, are made by Micron themselves ... you're pretty much guarranteed good performance and stability.

Ok, let's not waste any more time and take a closer look at the Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2-800 4Gb kit ...

 



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