Back in 1996 when Crucial first came to be, EDO (Extended Data Out) DRAM was the mainstream standard, and memory was far from cheap; at around $280 US for two 16MB EDO Crucial modules, systems required matched pairs. In fact EDO memory held more weight on the market than gold, if you can believe that. Over the years Crucial has built a strong reputation for delivering high quality, rock solid memory products. Today they offer a massive range of modules covering desktop, server, and even printer memory. Furthermore, Crucial also offers a very extensive range of flash memory products.

Although initially Crucial had little to do with the enthusiast market, they have slowly clawed their way into this segment as well. Surprisingly it has been 5 years since we last reviewed a Crucial product here at Legion Hardware. The last memory review we did based on a Crucial product looked at the very first DDR200 and DDR266 memory modules. Today we will be looking at a product designed for enthusiasts, a product not intended for the average user. The Crucial Ballistix Tracer memory is amongst the most impressive looking modules on the market.

While the Ballistix Tracer memory modules do look impressive, Crucial has made sure that they are not just all show, by giving them plenty of go! Designed to operate at 800MHz, these memory modules use relatively tight timings of CAS4-4-4-12, particularly given their 2GB capacity. Although the default DDR2 voltage specification is 1.8v, Crucial has bumped up the required voltage for these memory modules to 2.2v. However, we plan to increase the voltage even further as we will attempt to push the memory far beyond its recommended operating frequency of 800MHz.

Like just about all “enthusiast” built memory, the Ballistix Tracer modules feature heatspreaders, designed to cool the memory chips when they are operating at high frequencies using over rate voltages. The heatspreaders also look very cool and certainly appeal to case modders. However, what will really appeal to case modders are the LED activity lights which are mounted in the top of the memory modules, much like those found in the Corsair Pro memory modules.

The way in which Crucial has installed these LED’s does not look as impressive as the Corsair implementation. However, by not covering the LED’s they are much brighter and allow the Ballistix Tracer modules to light up the case. Another eye candy feature are the rear mounted bright white LED’s that are designed to illuminate the DIMM slots. By installing these memory modules onto a motherboard with brightly colored DIMM slots or even UV reactive DIMM slots, these memory modules look amazing. Enough about the eye candy, let’s move on to the testing...

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