Crucial Ballistix Sport XT DDR3 1866MHz 16GB Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

In the UK we are seeing pricing of £110.30 on Amazon and $139.99 in the USA on Newegg. This actually makes Crucial’s Ballistix Sport XT 16GB 1866MHz kit essentially one of the cheapest kits of its kind on the market at the moment. Availability is limited to a select few retailers right now but you will not struggle to find them at large retailers and at highly competitive prices too.

Conclusions

With this kit from Crucial I can certainly tell they are aiming at the more entry to mid range user. The green PCB combined with the rather bold-looking heatsink gives the product limited appeal to gamers or those where aesthetic isn’t of concern. The problem with the choice of blue is that it matches very few motherboards or DIY product ranges right now. In theory you could team up a Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H, a Gigabyte WindForce Graphics card with a blue PCB and maybe some Corsair SP120 fans with the blue rings on them to get a blue theme going on.  That said Crucial aren’t really targeting the system building enthusiast but more the gamer who wants some extra memory that “looks cool”. In my opinion the aggressive pricing and aggressive aesthetics will definitely achieve that objective. The fact Crucial are backing these kits with a limited lifetime warranty is also impressive given the attractive pricing they have.

What I didn’t like about the Crucial Ballistix Sport XT range was that the PCB is green. If you’ve got a blue kit, why not use a blue PCB? Or failing that why not just use black like everyone would do when “playing it safe”. Of course Crucial do sell black PCB variants, namely the Crucial Ballistix Elite and these are available in almost an identical configuration to this Ballistix Sport XT kit we just reviewed. They are also surprisingly a bit cheaper because they have been on the market for much longer and have more mature pricing. Of course we expect the pricing of these Ballistix Sport XT modules to fall further over the coming months too. My final niggle with the product was that overclocking doesn’t gain that much. That said this kit isn’t aimed at overclockers and we still managed to get to 2000MHz so I guess it still fared reasonably well.

Pros

• Limited lifetime warranty
• Aggressive pricing
• Gamer aesthetics
• Good performance, reasonable overclocking headroom
• Low voltage – 1.5v

Cons

• Green PCB
• Would of liked to see more overclocking potential
• Currently quite limited availability

“If you’re a gamer on a tight budget but want a high capacity memory kit operating at a high frequency then the new Crucial Ballistix Sport XT kits are ideal. Backed by Crucial’s high quality Micron components and a limited lifetime warranty these kits are excellent value for money. Of course if you are picky about aesthetics or need higher frequencies then Crucial’s Tactical, Tactical Tracer or Elite DDR3 kits may appeal to you more.”

Thank you to Crucial for providing this review sample.