With excellent overclockability, high performance and great looks, Crucial's new enthusiast Ballistix memory represents the cream of the crop.

Crucial, a long time maker of computer memory has recently been causing a bit of a stir with a new brand of high end memory called Crucial Ballistix. We at the Moditory wanted to see what this stuff is capable of for ourselves so that we could tell the rest of you what the fuss is all about. Curious to find out what we think of this new memory? Find out here!
Once again greeted by our friend Sir Brown Box, the memory arrived in working order. Sir Brown Box was alright too. Visually, this memory is quite appealing, with a dark gold heat spreader on top of black PCB. Crucial designed this memory for enthusiasts, and visually it really shows!
Of course, visuals are meaningless is the performance is lacking. To see what this enthusiast geared RAM has to offer, I ran this memory through our suite of benchmarks and tests.
TEST SYSTEM: AMD Athlon XP 3000+ (2167Mhz 166x13 and 200x10.5) microprocessor, Abit NF7-S Revision 2.0 motherboard, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB AGP 8X video card, Western Digital 80GB Special Edition hard drive
Memory timings set to optimum and synchronization at 6/6
A common question is weather purchasing high end memory over value geared memory is a worthwhile purchase, and one I have been personally pondering for some time. Along the same lines, another consideration is weather or not a gigabyte of memory is advisable against 512 Megabytes of RAM.

Our test suite consists of the following tests; Adobe Photoshop 7.0 load time from Cold Boot, SuperPi to one million digits, WinRAR compression, Unreal Tournament 2004 Flyby, Unreal Tournament 2004 Bot-Match, and the first minute of Combat in Level Four; The Silent Cartographer. Frame rates were measured in Fraps. All tests were conducted three times to ensure accurate results.


Now, onto the results!

Close case, but no visible difference outside of human error

Loading applications is more dependant on CPU speed than quantity of memory past a certain point. If you have a fast CPU, you don't need anything past 512 MB of memory to load the application. However, if you're working on multi-layered, large file size images or photographs, the story can change. In the above benchmark data, the difference is not significant enough to be outside of human error, and can be considered to be the same.

SuperPi; once again, showing you where its at.

However, in data compression, there is a very significant improvement to be seen when going from Generic RAM to Crucial Ballistix. With the SuperPi results, I was astounded when I saw the results of the test. I am highly impressed with what Crucial has managed to accomplish with this new memory. Unfortunately, the gain of one gigabyte is not nearly as substantial due to the restricted bandwidth in the Athlon XP platform. Other platforms will likely see even greater performance increases.

Here is another benchmark where a great deal of improvement is seen when you compare normal memory with high end RAM. The procedure is to run WinRAR's benchmarking utility for one minute to determine how much data has been successfully compressed. Memory and CPU intensive applications is where high end memory shines best, as is evident in this test. It is unfortunate that the limited memory bandwidth of the Athlon XP restricts the amount of benefit you get out of a gigabyte of memory over 512 megabytes. The results are impressive none the less.

Running through the first minute of combat in Halo PC's The Silent Cartographer produced these results. Halo PC is more GPU and CPU dependant than on memory, as we can see. However, reasonable improvement is seen in this game using Ballistix over Generic memory. When it comes to a gig however, no real improvement is visible, again, due to bandwidth constraints.

No substantial performance gains, but there is a visible improvement.

Again, CPU and GPU limitations are evident in the Unreal Tournament 2004 fly byes. There is a reasonable amount of improvement in frame rates using a gigabyte of RAM over 512 megabytes, due to the more resource intensive nature of Unreal Tournament 2004.

A much more significant lead using one gigabyte of Crucial Ballistix over 512 Megabytes than in the previous test.

More significant improvements are visible in the more CPU and Memory intensive application of a Bot Match. In an indoor environment, not nearly as much data is rendered at the same time, and smaller textures are used, limiting memory demand. One gigabyte of RAM starts becoming more useful in outdoor environments, even on the Athlon XP platform.

A big flyby in a big outdoor map yields these results.

When rendering big, highly detailed outdoor environments there is a good deal of improvement in frame rates when using either 512 MB of Crucial Ballistix or one Gigabyte, compared with 512 megabytes of generic memory. The difference is likely to be even more pronounced on higher bandwidth platforms. Big time gamers, Crucial Ballistix is definitely the stuff you want here; the winner in this 32 bot match is a gig of Crucial Ballistix.

On the less active side of the spectrum

On the other side of the system demand spectrum, flybys don't tend to display any highly significant performance advantages for any memory contender due to what needs to be displayed being already fully loaded. There is a visible improvement however using Crucial Ballistix-And a little more using one gigabyte of it.

The most significant performance improvements are visible in memory intensive applications, such as file compression, media encoding, decoding, and data processing. As a result of this, I decided to see how much improvement I could get out of my scores by over clocking this memory-and to see just how high my standard setup could go using this memory.

My best SuperPi stable overclock was 460 Mhz Front side Bus, with a clock speed of 2190 Mhz. (230x9.5). Being a bit of a virgin system in the overclocking department, I was quite impressed with what this memory allowed me to do. My SuperPi time was cut back a full two seconds, resulting in a one million digit calculation time of 46 seconds. My WinRAR data saw even greater improvement. I was able to calculate a full megabyte more data in the benchmark's time of one minute, resulting in an error free compression of 23 megabytes of data, with a bit rate of 358 Kilobytes per second; a full 3% improvement over my original data.

Crucial has added some serious competition to the high end memory market with their Ballistix brand memory. With excellent improvements visible in comparison with generic memory, I am very impressed with this RAM. I managed to achieve a significant overclock on a system not fine tuned for overclocking. Experienced users should be able to push this memory much harder.

With excellent performance in stock speeds, excellent overclockability, and an awesome look, Crucial Ballisitix represents the cream of the crop. I am thoroughly satisfied with Crucial Ballistix Memory, and I would whole heartidly recommend it to anyone. I honestly have nothing to complain about; which is a first for any review on The Moditory. Crucial Ballistix brand memory has achieved near perfection. We proudly award Crucial Ballistix memory a 100% on our ratings scale.

Pros:
Brilliant performance
Excellent overclockability
Great visual Appeal

Cons:
No issues! Definitely worth the extra $30 over generic.

The Moditory is proud to award Crucial Ballistix our Gold Award for overall excellence, as well as our Editor's Choice awards. Well done, Crucial; well done indeed!