With the brand new Ballistix series, Crucial boldly goes where it has not gone before: the enthusiast and individualist market. While the memory that is manufactured by Micron has usually been rather conservative, DDR2 Ballistix is going for gold. According to the label, it's officially the fastest DDR2-667 memory with CL4-4-4-10 thus far, which we can confirm.
With both 512 MB DIMMs we had the test system running at a maximum memory clock of 357 MHz at CL5-5-5-15, which makes the Crucial DIMMs the faster running memory. But the jury is still out on a final verdict, as the test samples were specified to be operated at 2.0 V, while the production version only requires 1.9 V. It is very likely that the clock speed levels increase with each day that the manufacturing process matures - and this is, of course, applicable to all memory manufacturers.
The Ballistix modules are correctly identified as memory from Micron.
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Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.
