Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4-2666 Memory Review

By Jason Maxfield

Manufacturer: Micron Technology, Inc.
Product Name: Crucial Ballistix Elite 16GB Kit (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2666 UDIMM
Model Number: BLE2K8G4D26AFEA
UPC: 649528770592 EAN: 0649528770592
Price As Tested: $74.50 (Amazon / Newegg)

Full Disclosure: The product sample used in this article has been provided by Crucial.

DDR4 RAM launched in Q2 of 2014 with ECC (error correcting code) memory technology, followed shortly by consumer versions launching with the introduction of the Intel’s Haswell-E. Now that prices have dropped to DDR3 levels and LGA 1551 motherboards have been out since September 2015, DDR4 is becoming more mainstream in the PC upgrade market.

Crucial sent us a sample of their DDR4-2666MHz 16GB Ballistix Elite RAM. Crucial Ballistix Elite is their premium memory line, with speeds ranging from 2666MHz to 3200MHz, and memory capacities from 4GB to 32GB in single to quad channel kits. Crucial is pushing the speed envelope with their line of Ballistix Elite memory kits well past the DDR4 standard of 2133MHz. In this article for Benchmark Reviews, I’m going to see if higher bandwidth memory makes a difference. Will Crucial Ballistix Elite deliver, or fall short of the mark? Let’s find out!

I will be running a series of synthetic benchmarks to test the Crucial Ballistix Elite RAM. The memory will be going head-to-head with a Corsair Vengeance LPX 2400MHz 16GB (CMK16GX4M2A2400C14) kit.

Features & Specifications

Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4

Outplay. Outmatch. Outlast. The future of performance memory is here.

To max out performance in the final days of DDR3 technology, you needed the right processor, the right motherboard, a PhD in overclocking, and the willingness to surrender everything in your wallet. Not anymore.

 

Product Specifications
Brand	Ballistix
Total Capacity	16GB Kit (2 x 8GB)
Warranty	Limited Lifetime
Specs	DDR4 PC4-21300 • 16-17-17 • Unbuffered • NON-ECC • DDR4-2666 • 1.2V • 1024Meg x 64 •
Series	Ballistix Elite
Form Factor	UDIMM
ECC	NON-ECC
Module Qty	2
Speed	2666 MT/S
Tracer	False
Voltage	1.2V
DIMM Type	Unbuffered
Bullet Features	Designed for extreme enthusiasts, gamers and overclockers

Product specifications taken from Crucial’s website.

Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4 Memory Overview

The Curcial Ballistix Elite DDR4 2666MHz kit that I received is what I would call ‘entry level’ into the Elite lineup of memory kits. Crucial has built a factory overclocked memory kit using the standard 1.2V, while bumping speeds up to 2666MHz. Their 3000MHz and 3200MHz counterparts run at 1.35V, which is pretty standard for overclocked versions of memory at those speeds.

Crucial packages their Ballistix Elite memory in an easy to open plastic clam shell. Thankfully the tabs at the top of the packaging make removal of the kit nice and easy.

The Crucial Ballistix Elite RAM has quite a sleek profile. The black on black with white letter print will work in a wide variety of color schemes.

The Ballistix Elite heat spreaders are made out of aluminum, while not quite low profile, do have a removable heat sink on the top edge of the RAM.

After removing the 4 tiny screws you can remove the heat sink on top of the Ballistix Elite module. This will give you a few more millimeters to work with if you are having clearance issues and save yourself a bit of weight in your PC case. This kit has a decent heft to them. The 2 modules together weigh in close to 1 pound.

I took a shot of the Ballistix Elite installed to show you the clearance (or lack there-of), with my Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo CPU cooler. I had to move the Noctua 120mm fan slightly higher on the cooler to get the RAM to sit underneath without sitting flush against the bottom of the fan.

Testing and Results

Testing Methodology

As mentioned before, I’ll be doing a head-to-head comparison between the Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4-2666MHz, and the Corsair Vengeance LPX 2400MHz Memory kit. I used their XMP profiles to set their timings, which my motherboard had no issues setting and were perfectly stable.

For comparison sake, I’ll list the timings of each RAM kit:

Crucial Ballistix Elite: 16-17-17-36 CR-1 2666MHz

Corsair Vengeance LPX: 14-16-16-31 CR-2 2400MHz

Test System

• Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z170X-Gaming 6 (rev. 1.0)
• System Memory: Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4 16GB 2666MHz / Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB 2400MHz
• Processor: Intel Skylake 6700K @ 4.2GHz Stock settings
• Audio: On-board Realtek ALC-1150 codec
• Video: EVGA 980 Ti Classified Edition
• Disk Drive 1: Samsung 840 Evo 120GB SSD SATA 3
• Disk Drive 2: Western Digital Black 2TB HDD SATA 3
• Optical Drive: Asus DVD/Burner
• Enclosure: Cooler Master HAF 922
• PSU: Corsair HX850 850 Watt
• Monitor: Samsung 32″ LCD
• Operating System: Windows 10 64-bit Home

Test Software

• Aida 64 Engineer 5.75.3900
• SiSoft Sandra Lite 2016.03.22.20
• Passmark Performance Test 9.0
• CPU-z 1.76.0
• Handbrake 0.15.5.0 64 bit
• 3D Mark 11 Profesional Edition
• Heaven Benchmark 4.0
• Valley Benchmark 1.0

Results

AIDA 64 Engineer 5.75 Memory Test

Aida 64 is one of the main staples of synthetic tests for finding maximum theoretic memory bandwidth. As with all synthetic benchmarks, this isn’t an accurate means to measure real-world performance. But, for the purposes of comparison in this article it will suffice.

The higher bandwidth Crucial Ballistix Elite wins out in all 3 categories. Crucial Ballistix Elite manages an 11.82% increase in read, 10.71% in write, and 9.51% in copy. Synthetic maximum bandwidth should be taken with a grain of salt, as it usually bears little real-world results.

SiSoft Sandra Lite 2016.03.22.20

SiSoft SANDRA (System Analyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) compromises a whole suite of benchmarking tools to analyze the performance of various hardware components. That is outside the scope of this article and we’ll be focusing on the memory tests specifically.

Again we see the Crucial Ballistix Elite pull ahead by a margin of 9.46% in Integer, and 10.28% in Float. That is a consistent margin between the first two tests.

Passmark Performance Test v9.0

Passmark has a variety of test suites, not unlike Aida 64 and SiSoft Sandra. We are only interested in the memory performance, comparing uncached read, cached read, and write tests.

Passmark shows a bit of a different story between the two kits of RAM. With only 5.11% difference between uncached read, 0.47% in cached read, and 6.33% in write performance, Crucial can only claim a slight victory in the uncached read and write categories, while the cached read is a wash.

CPU-z 1.76.0

CPU-z is a widely known application for retrieving mainly CPU specs, cache, and motherboard information. We are interested in the benchmark for single and muti-threaded performance for this article.

The reference Intel 6700K scores 2064 in single threaded, and 8767 in multi-threaded performance. Comparing these numbers it’s pretty much a wash. The biggest difference here is -0.75% in multi-threaded performance to the Corsair Vengeance kit. This was consistent when tested multiple times. I’m guessing the lower CAS timings play a bigger part in the multi-threaded performance for this test, as memory speed seems to make no difference between these two memory kits.

Testing and results continued on the next page.

Testing & Results Continued

Time to change up the tests a bit. I wanted to throw in some GPU and rendering programs to the mix and get an idea of the extra speed the Crucial Ballistix Elite offers is worth it.

Handbrake 0.15.5.0 64bit

First up we have Handbrake. Handbrake is an open source video transcoder. Unlike some of the other applications used for testing, Handbrake is not a synthetic test. The results below are ‘real-world’.

I recorded a 5 minute 1080p video using my phone. The resulting transcode time from Handbrake is neck and neck, with a slight edge of 2 seconds going to the Crucial Ballistix Elite kit.

3DMark 11 Professional Edition

Futuremark’s 3DMark software has been around in various iterations for quite some time now. Mainly for testing GPU and physics, this software can still bring modern PC’s to their knees with the 1080p Extreme preset.

3DMark 11 has quite a lot of tests to throw at any benchmarking computer. So many in fact, that I had to make two charts to manage the results.

In the first chart we have overall 3DMark scores. Graphics, physics, and combined scores. There is very little difference in the scores between the Crucial Ballistix Elite and Corsair Vengeance kits. However, the Crucial Ballistix Elite is the winner in every category, even if the numbers are relatively small.

The second chart focuses on the graphics tests. Scores show the raw FPS numbers, and as you can see the EVGA 980 Ti Classified did not trounce through the Extreme preset by any means. Again, we are seeing very tight numbers here. The results are essentially a tie. The Crucial Ballistix Elite does manage slightly better numbers, but in a real-world scenario you would not be able to tell a difference.

Heaven Benchmark 4.0 / Valley Benchmark 1.0

The folks over at Unigine specialize in real-time 3D technologies. They are heavily involved in simulations, virtual reality, and video gaming, just to name a few things.

Heaven Benchmark focuses on DX9, DX11, and OpenGL 4.0 tests, with the ability to test tessellation. I ran Heaven in 1080p with Ultra preset, Extreme tessellation, and 8x AA.

Valley Benchmark 1.0 adds dynamic sky, volumetric clouds, sun shafts, DOF (depth of field), and ambient occlusion to pound your graphics card to the limit. I set Valley Benchmark to 1080p, Ultra preset, with 8xAA.

As with Handbrake these GPU tests are not synthetic. Although they are scripted tests, they are much closer to a real-world gaming scenario.

The verdict is a virtual tie. The Crucial Ballistix Elite again wins on both accounts, but only by the slightest of margins. Watching these benchmarks run with both memory kits there was no visual difference to be discerned.

Gaming performance is helped some-what by memory speed, but it’s mainly about having enough RAM installed to satisfy your games requirements. Too little RAM installed is going to be more of a hindrance by a long-shot than having higher speed RAM for marginal gains in gaming performance.

Final Thoughts

Testing the Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4-2666MHz has been fun and educational. You may have noticed by now that I did not include any overclocking results. I had some teething issues while doing this article. Mainly dealing with the Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 6 motherboard and a corrupted Windows install (oops). Needless to say, I learned some things about attempting overclocking RAM when you have no previous experience doing so. In the end for stabilities sake, I decided to test the RAM with their XMP profiles enabled and called it a day.

The Crucial Ballistix Elite RAM seems to be aimed at enthusiasts and overclockers, but with the added advantage of not being absurdly expensive memory to go into that shiny new PC build. Saving some money on RAM could mean a slightly better component somewhere else in your build.

DDR4 has had time to mature, and 2666MHz is lower-ground when it comes to DDR4 memory speeds. DDR4-4266MHz is at the top of the heap, but at a costly punch to ones wallet. 4266MHz is not really practical for most normal use scenarios, as many programs just do not need that much bandwidth to function at optimal speeds.

Conclusion

The performance of the Ballistix Elite is hard to rate. It was better than the Corsair Vengeance LPX kit. It did what it was designed to do, just ever so slightly faster on paper. Realistically I could not perceive any difference, other than a slight bit faster boot time than I had with the Corsair memory.

The aesthetics of the Crucial Ballistix Elite line-up are nice. The kit feels like it could take a bullet and shrug it off. Nice and solid heft, makes it feel as if your money is well spent. In my case, no money was spent, but I would buy this kit just based on looks, as it will accommodate a wide variety of color schemes and blend right in.

As I mentioned already, the construction of this kit is solid. The kit weighs close to 1 pound with how much aluminum is on the Ballistix Elite kit. Mainly due to the top heat-sink having a thick top ridge.

Functionality was spot-on. The XMP profile enabled right away with proper timings. I had no errors running this kit through Memtest and Windows memory manager for several hours with XMP profile enabled.

Value is always a bit objective to me. At the time of testing the Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4-2666 memory kit was listed online for $74.50 (Amazon / Newegg). In comparison the Corsair Kit is currently $77.99 on newegg. Considering those prices, the Crucial Ballistix Elite is the value winner between these two kits. The Ballistix Elite is higher speed, yet costs less.

At the current price I would not hesitate to buy the Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4-2666MHz kit if I was in the market for some new memory. Crucials Ballistix Elite series has a variety of speeds from 2666MHz to 3200MHz if 2666MHz is just too slow for you.

Pros:

+Excellent price for DDR4 memory
+Flawless XMP profile
+Solid build quality
+Removable heat-sink
+Visually appealing RAM
+Lifetime Warranty

Cons:

-Not quite low profile memory. May have issues with certain coolers/motherboards clearance

Ratings:

• Performance: 9.00
• Appearance: 9.50
• Construction: 9.75
• Functionality: 9.00
• Value: 9.00

Final Score: 9.25 out of 10.

Excellence Achievement: Benchmark Reviews Golden Tachometer Award.

COMMENT QUESTION: Who do you turn to for system memory?