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Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR2-800 2GB Memory Kit
Page 1 of 5 Good RAM wouldn't be good if it didn't have rows of flashing lights under its heatspreader. Wait, that makes no sense. RAM is good when it, and, therefore, your computer, blazes. It should be about lower latencies and higher bandwidth, not Blinken- and ground lights. But are the two mutually exclusive? If we apply rice theory, spinners and lights may be added to any vehicle (import or domestic--although it's pretty hard to be impressed by a pimped-out Taurus) and imply, but are not evidence of, high performance. OK, so hear me out--there's a place where that metaphor comes back to fit, fer rills. Real racecars don't have lights and junk. That's heavy. Can high-performance RAM have lights? Will the extra stuff and/or heat weigh down the memory just as surely as would a tail fin lovingly crafted from Bondo? The Memory Without lights--without power--this is good-looking RAM. It's got a shocking, reflective band of textured heatspreader around the edge that encloses a black matte finish sporting the bright Ballistix Tracer logo. The sticker looks out-of-place. Then there're the lights. Very pretty. I definitely come from a place where lights are the very antithesis of pretty; I don't like things that aren't useful, and these sort of count. I say sort of because they reflect which modules are being written to and read from(in theory, because they could just as well just flash randomly and who would know?), and they appear to blink logically in flight. If anything, they'll tell you if you stick the RAM in single- or dual-channel slots; when they're in single channel, they flash identically, but when they're running in dual-channel mode, they look like a firework display. But it's all so hypnotic. It's like watching the lights of separate drives in RAID 5 blink. There's a system at work, and when it's working hard, it flashes so...I shouldn't write this in the same room as the lights...the lights. So yeah, they're very pretty. The RAM is clocked at 4-12-4-4 running at 2.2 volts, which is quite a bit more than JEDEC's 1.8V standard. I have to assume that some of the extra power goes to running the LEDs but, just the same, these modules get fairly hot because of it.    
Page 1: Introduction & The Memory
Page 2: Testing: Synthetic Applications Page 3: Testing: Games Page 4: Performance Summary & Overclocking Page 5: Conclusion
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