Crucial Ballistix Elite 2666MHz DDR4 Review

Rikki Wright / 10 years ago

Final Thoughts

Pricing (accurate at the time of writing)

Crucial’s Ballistix Elite 16GB 2666MHz DDR4 memory kit is currently available in the UK from limited retailers. I have found it for the cheapest price of £219.21 from DABS.com. In the USA it is a little easier to find, but the best price I found was $264.99 from Newegg.com.

Summary

The Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4 memory is a fantastic kit, offering Crucials’ best performance modules with a great looking heatsink. In the dedicated memory tests, this set came out top in both stock and overclocked form, which shows that it isn’t all about speed, but how well the memory works together and how it talks to the CPU.

Now I’ll be honest here, I’m no overclocking guru, overclocking RAM completely baffles me at the best of times and the process of working on this RAM has shown me the easy way to overclock. It was so easy to do and when it didn’t work, it didn’t POST so it was easy enough to go into the BIOS and tweak from there. After a small voltage increase to 1.3v, I managed to get the overclock to 2800MHz. I did manage a 2933MHz, but it crashed during out AIDA64 and SiSoft benchmarks, so knocked it back to 2800MHz and lowered the timings; better timings and better performance is just win-win.

Pros

Low profile design
Excellent performance
Lifetime warranty

Cons

Pricing isn’t competitive compared to G-Skill and Corsair 16GB 2666MHz sets
Overclocking was limited

“Crucial’s Elite DDR4 kit is an excellent kit. Despite its higher price compared to other 2666MHz kits, its stock performance is on par with 2800MHz kits, making it well worth the money for those looking to investin DDR4.”