Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer DDR3-1866 16GB Quad Channel Memory Kit Review

Installation, Overclocking & Testing Procedures
Installing these modules is like any other memory modules out there…just slide them in and you are good to go.  I installed these modules out of the case because I was changing CPU coolers, but the heatspreaders are not that big at all so you shouldn’t have any issues installing them inside of your case.

Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer DDR3-1866 16GB Quad Channel Memory Kit Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer DDR3-1866 16GB Quad Channel Memory Kit

When you power your system on you will notice that the modules light up!  The modules we received have blue LED’s on them and they look awesome.  You have LEDs on the top and ground effect LEDs.  This is definitely going to bring some attention to your case if you have a window!

Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer DDR3-1866 16GB Quad Channel Memory Kit Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer DDR3-1866 16GB Quad Channel Memory Kit

The LEDs are not just on at all times they actually react in terms of memory activity, which is actually really cool!  Check out the video below to see them in action!

Overclocking this memory was actually extremely easy.  We are on X79 so memory is overclocked independently from the CPU for the most part.  This memory has default timings of DDR3-1866 9-9-9-27 at 1.5v.  I decided to bump the memory up to 2133MHz, no boot.  I upped the voltage to 1.6v and the system did boot and passed the stability test.  The next step up from 2133MHz is 2400MHz.  I never thought this memory would boot at that speed but after changing a few things I was able to get a stable boot at DDR3-2400 with timings of 11-11-11-24 at 1.65v!  That is pretty impressive for DDR-1866 memory!

info

Our test system is comprised of the following items.

Processor: Intel Core i7-3820
Motherboard: ASUS P9X79 Pro
Video Card: ASUS GeForce GTX 560 Ti DirectCU II TOP
Memory: 16GB Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer DDR3-1866
Power Supply: Thermaltake 1200W
Storage: 750GB SATA II Drive
Cooling: Noctua NH-L12
Case: Cooler Master Cosmos II

We have a set battery of benchmarks for Memory reviews.  We have listed the applications we use for testing below.

SiSoftware Sandra
– Memory Bandwidth Benchmark
– Latency Benchmark
– Cache Benchmark
AIDA64 Cache & Memory Benchmark
MaxxMem – Preview
SuperPi

Now let’s get to testing!

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