Crucial Ballistix DDR2-667

Product: Crucial Ballistix PC2-5300 2GB Kit
Provided By: Crucial Technology
Price: $383.99 USD w/Free Shipping

Introduction:

AMD has just launched its latest AM2 processor which supports DDR2.  For well over a year now, Intel has been using DDR2 and now that AMD has joined the present DDR2 will be replacing DDR quite quickly.  Crucial has been producing DDR2 ever since Intel made the move, and now their process is refined to a science.  While DDR2 scales much higher that traditional DDR it's slower latencies often hamper performance to the point where DDR at slower clock speeds is still faster than DDR2.  Today we are looking at a nice 2GB kit that clocks in at 667MHz with pretty decent timings, 3-3-3-12.  This is the Crucial Ballistix BL2KIT12864AA663 kit.  It doesn't have fancy lights or nickel plated heat spreaders.  It's all about performance, not eye candy.  Let's take a look and see what Crucial is really offering here.

Module Details:

• Part Number: BL2KIT12864AA663
• Module Size: 2GB kit (1GBx2)
• Package: Ballistix 240-pin DIMM
• Feature: DDR2 PC2-5300
• Configuration: 128Meg x 64
• DIMM Type: UNBUFFERED
• Error Checking: NON-ECC
• Speed: DDR2-667
• Voltage: 2.2V
• Memory Timings: 3-3-3-12
• Specs: DDR2 PC2-5300 • 3-3-3-12 • UNBUFFERED • NON-ECC • DDR2-667 • 2.2V • 128Meg x 64

The Modules:

The modules arrived from Crucial in a FedEx envelope and then inside of their traditional brown box.  They modules are all made alike, so Crucial doesn't have to test the modules and put specific "matching" sticks into a kit. According to Crucial, all of their modules match.  For the most part this philosophy seems to work, but there was a time when I was having issues with a couple of sticks.  Once they swapped them out it worked fine.

Crucial uses some pretty standard aluminum heat spreaders on their modules which are held down with a couple of clips.  They use some thick thermal tape to make contact with the BGA ram chips and the aluminum heat spreader.  I've had some OCZ memory over the years that didn't actually make proper contact, so it's nice to see that these DDR2 modules are built right.

Heatspreader Contact

Overclocking:

These memory modules come clocked in at 667MHz DDR2 and with 3-3-3-12 timings.  Crucial doesn't state in their specs whether or not these modules are rated at 1T or 2T.  We were able to run them at their stock speeds clocked at 1T.  When overclocking these modules, we found that we were able to keep fairly tight timings up to 800MHz DDR2.  After this point, we had to loosen the timings in order to clock higher.

For our memory benchmarks on the next page, we started by under clocking these modules to a synchronous clock speed that matched our Intel 805 Dual Core processor.  We tightened the timings up a bit as well.  This is the first DDR2 memory review we've done, and we weren't sure what to expect with a low-end Intel rig.  We overclocked and benchmarked the memory two ways.  First, we kept the processor at stock speed and used RAM dividers to determine the maximum clock speed that it could reach.  For the second attempt, we overclocked our processor and FSB to give the modules more bandwidth.  Using the first method seemed to starve the modules, and overclocking the memory really didn't increase its performance.

Here's what we were able to achieve:

On the following page we'll take a look at our test setup and then get on to testing this memory!