Crucial Ballistix DDR3-2000 PC3-16000 2Gb Kits ... Memory speed like you've never seen before

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. Crucial continues its tradition as being one of industry leaders when it come to memory products. They've just released their latest Ballistix DDR3 kits rated at PC3-16000, designed and aimed at the high-end enthusiast market. 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). "

As predicted the prices of DDR3 memory is slowly falling, but it's still expensive compared with DDR2. A lot of the newer mainstream motherboards on the market right now, still opt to support DDR2 ram due to its price and good performance. This is not to say that DDR3 hasn't gained any ground over the past year or so. In fact, we are now seeing a lot of high-end enthusiasts going for motherboards that support DDR3 in order to get the best overclocks. It's no surprise as DDR3 can reach higher speeds than DDR2 ... During Cebit 2008, Corsair Memory along with other memory manufacturers were demonstrating their modules running beyond that 2000Mhz barrier. This is ONLY achieveable using DDR3 ram.

So, yes ... I reckon DDR3 will soon become the mainstream memory in 18-24 months. But for now, the niche market of the high-end enthusiasts is where you'll find most of the DDR3 ram.

The labelling and classification of DDR3 memory can be a little confusing at times, but I'll try and give you some DDR3 terminology ... More information can be found HERE

 - PC3-6400 : DDR3-800 : 200FSB : 400Mhz (800Mhz)
 - PC3-8500 : DDR3-1066 : 266FSB : 533Mhz (1066Mhz)
 - PC3-10666 : DDR3-1333 : 333FSB : 667Mhz (1333Mhz)
 - PC3-12800 : DDR3-1600 : 400FSB : 800Mhz (1600Mhz)
 - PC3-14400 : DDR3-1800 : 450FSB : 900Mhz (1800Mhz)
 - PC3-16000 : DDR3-2000 : 500FSB : 1000Mhz (2000Mhz)

In this review, our CPU3D review team will be taking a look at these Crucial Ballistix PC3-16000 2Gb Kits. These modules are currently Crucial's highest performing memory kits available and they don't come cheap. Rated at DDR3-2000, these modules can run at 1000Mhz, but offers very high memory timings of 9-9-9-28. Yes, the latency is very high, and could affect the overall performance, but using the motherboard BIOS, we can set these timings to a much lower level ... say 7-7-7-21. These modules also offer EPP (enhanced memory profile) support, which enables easy memory configuration without having to manually adjust BIOS settings.

These Crucial Ballistix modules are identical in appearance to all their other Ballistix modules, with the only difference being the DDR3 stickers. They have that distinctive gold/orange heat speader, which should provide adquate cooling. Using high quality Micron memory ICs, I'm sure that Crucial can deliver the goods in terms of performance and stability.

In our tests we'll bee installing these modules on an Asus P5E3 Deluxe motherboard, along with our trusted old Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (B3 stepping) processor and a Radeon HD3870 512Mb DDR4 graphics card, PC Power & Cooling 860W PSU, 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. But more importantly, how well will these modules overclock? ... They should be able to easily reach 2000Mhz (that's 1000Mhz x 2), however in order to do that, my CPU and motherboard must be overclocked by increasing the FSB to 500Mhz ...

Ok, let's not waste any more time and take a closer look at the Crucial Ballistix DDR3-2000 PC3-16000 2Gb kit ...