Crucial Ballistix Sport VLP DDR3-1600 16GB Kit

Product: Crucial Ballistix VLP DDR3-1600 16GB Kit
Provided By: Crucial
Price: $107.99 MSRP @ Publication

Introduction:

Today I will be looking at another set of low profile RAM released by Crucial. Crucial is a well known brand of Micron, a large producer of memory.  Crucial also produces high quality SSD drives, as well as, USB Drives. You can check out more products by Crucial here (insert link to www.crucial.com).

The sample that is on the bench today is Crucial's Ballistix Sport VLP (very low profile). It is DDR3 PC-3 12800 @ 1600MHz. This kit includes 2 x 8 GB sticks, they are rated at 1.35v (1.5v in XMP2 mode), and they have a timing of 9-9-9-24 1T. 

First Impression:

The Ballistix Sport VLP came packaged in a standard, plastic clam shell. They were securely held in a removable tray that immobilized the modules until you were ready to install. The package also had a large sticker denoting the type, speed, size, model, and latency of what was contained. 

I was actually amazed when I seen how small these modules were. When crucial says, "very low profile," they mean it! I recently tested another low profile module from crucial, Ballistix Tactical LP(link Tactical Review), and the Ballistix Sport VLP makes those look big.

Being small there really isn't a lot of room to use, but Crucial made sure to use what room it did have. The heat spreader seems like it can do the job of heat dissipation. The spreaders aren't real flashy, but they do have thicker, grooved areas around the borders to help get rid of the heat.  The fact that this memory can run up to speed at 1.35v doesn't hurt the thermal situation either.

On the next page, we'll talk briefly about the specifications and features of this RAM before we jump into isntallation and testing.