Crucial Ballistix RGB DDR4 1x16Gb BL16G36C16U4RL

Closed production cycle

A couple of years ago, the American manufacturer Crucial broke into the memory market with their low-cost and not-so-low-cost SSDs and RAM. In fact, “burst” is not a very correct term, rather it was a return to basics, since one of the largest manufacturers of Micron memory microchips stands behind Crucial. Therefore, one of the main selling points of the Ballistix series has become a complete production cycle with high quality control.

16 GB kit @ 3600 MHz

Our test kit includes a single 16 GB Ballistix stick with a red aluminium heatsink that serves as additional cooling for the chips and the memory controller. A translucent light guide is fixed at the end, through which RGB elements are translucent. Thanks to the use of e-die chips, the memory proved to be worthy in operation and wound up at the claimed 3600 MHz, immediately picking up its factory XMP profile. Given Ballistix's past successful overclocking experience and low stock latencies, we hoped that our version would be able to hit the 4200 MHz mark. However, the system was acting up, so it was decided to go down to 4000 MHz. On the test system with Intel, the problem was solved instantly, on the motherboard with AMD, I had to tinker a little with the values of the CAS profile and voltage.

Price, quality and reliability

Perhaps the main charm of the test sample is the price. A single bar with a capacity of 16 GB will cost 10 – 15% cheaper than most popular overclocker kits with an identical capacity and the same frequency of 3600 MHz. It turns out to be especially profitable if you assemble a system with a serious amount of RAM and buy 2, 3 or 4 bars at once to work in multi-channel mode. But in the role of a single memory module, this is no longer such an interesting option, since the dual-channel mode gives a small but sure increase in performance in modern games and resource-intensive applications.