Micron Kills Off Crucial's Iconic Ballistix Gaming RAM

Crucial Ballistix Max
Crucial Ballistix Max (Image credit: Crucial)

Through a press release today, Micron announced that it has decided to readjust its business strategy for Crucial's consumer memory products. As a result, Micron has discontinued the Ballistix, Ballistix Max, and Ballistix Max RGB lineups. 

It's unclear why Micron has abandoned its only enthusiast-class memory family. However, the company stated in the communique that it "will intensify its focus on the development of Micron's DDR5 client and server product roadmap, along with the expansion of the Crucial memory and storage product portfolio."

The Ballistix series, which has existed since the DDR days, was the only enthusiast gaming memory that Crucial had in its arsenal. Micron's latest move explains why the company never transitioned the Ballistix lineup to the new DDR5 standard. However, Crucial does sell standard JEDEC DDR5 memory, and will continue to do so. Those sticks come as standard DIMMs with a PCB and ICs, but they don't have heat spreaders or any other types of high-end trimmings. 

It's important to note that the change will only affect Crucial's performance memory business. Micron has reiterated its commitment to continue supporting the compute and gaming crowd with its SSD drives, like the Crucial P5 Plus and Crucial P2, and portable SSDs, including the Crucial X6 and Crucial X8.

"We remain focused on growing our NVMe and Portable SSD product categories, which both offer storage solutions for PC and console gamers. Additionally, Crucial JEDEC standard DDR5 memory provides mainstream gamers with DDR5-enabled computers with better high-speed performance, data transfers, and bandwidth than previously available with Crucial Ballistix memory," said Teresa Kelley, Vice President and General Manager of the Micron Commercial Products Group.

Zhiye Liu
News Editor and Memory Reviewer

Zhiye Liu is a news editor and memory reviewer at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

  • watzupken
    To me, it is probably more profitable just selling RAM chips to other manufacturers/ OEMs, instead of having to develop their own product and deal with issues/ RMA requests from retail side of things. This is especially the case when you have to contend with additional issues of rising cost and supply chain disruptions. Like almost all PC components, RAM is also a cut throat product to sell with too many competitors. So trying to differentiate yourself from the sea of other RAM in the market is going to be very difficult even if you are willing to impact your bottom line by reducing price.
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    wonder if this is why its sold out everywhere or liek $25 over normal price..

    been tryign grab soem 3600 sticks but can't find em :|
    Reply
  • Co BIY
    It's chip customers in the "performance" market may not have appreciated competing against their supplier either.
    Reply
  • Why_Me
    This news sucks =/
    Reply
  • GoboII
    Ballistix will live on in our hearts. I guess we'll have to find a different source of reliably decent but not exceedingly expensive overclocking memory.
    Reply
  • slurmsmckenzie
    That chimes with me, I've used Ballistix on all three of the builds I've done since 2010, it always struck the right balance. Shame.
    Reply
  • gggplaya
    I can understand dropping the higher tier ballstix MAX, but the regular Ballistix looks like regular ram modules with a cheap aluminum heatsink attached to it. What's wrong with selling it like that?
    Reply
  • helper800
    I guess its down to G Skill, Corsair, and Kingston for me. Too bad, Ballistix was good RAM.
    Reply
  • bdcrlsn
    A sad news day. Had Ballistix in most of my pervious builds.
    Reply