Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR3-1866 – 16Gb Kit Review

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One thing I found to be a pain in the butt was the packaging. I am not a big fan of blister packs at all. If crucial could throw them in a cardboard box, or make the package reuseable in some sort of way that would be great. 

Closer Look

The memory itself has pretty large heatspreaders, almost too large in my opinion. When trying to install a Noctua NH-D14 I was unable to do so due to how tall the memory is. For people with smaller heatsinks there should not be an issue, but if you use a 38mm fan on your air heatsink you could run into problems as well if your motherboard does not have a large enough space between the ram slots and the motherboard socket.

Throughout testing the memory had a tendency to get warm to the touch. While this is not a bad thing is does mean that the heatspreaders are making proper contact with the memory chips so make sure that there is airflow on the memory, especially if you are running a watercooling system.

If you are new to installing memory, thanks to Bobnova here is a quick and easy guide:

1. Remove your old ram, leaving the latches open.
2. Line the notch in the stick of ram up with the ridge in the slot.
3. Gently insert the ram and double-check that you have it in the proper way.
4. Apply firm pressure until the ram clicks in.  It should close the latches automatically.
5. You’re done!  Now you need to go into your bios and do the software part.

Test Setup and Procedure

The following system will be used to test this ram:

We’ll be using the following benchmarks and identification programs:

• CPU-Z
• AIDA64
• wprime
• Maxxmem
• SuperPi 32m