Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4-2666 Memory Review – Stylish Design and Exceptional Performance

BENCHMARKS

MEMORY BANDWIDTH

For bench-marking memory bandwidth we use AIDA64’s ‘Cache and Memory Benchmark

We can see that our overclocked 2800MHz configuration has gained quite a bit of bandwidth over stock, and even our rated speed of 2666MHz with lower timings outpaces the stock configuration easily. This is looking pretty good so far.

MEMORY LATENCY

For bench-marking memory latency we use AIDA64’s ‘Cache and Memory Benchmark’

Latency has improved quite a bit after tuning, with results as low as 58.9 nanoseconds for our 2666MHz configuration. It does seem like Crucial may have shot itself in the foot by not at least packaging this kit as a CL15 or even CL14 kit.

CINEBENCH R15

Maxon’s Cinebench is a benchmarking tool based on their Cinema 4D software. It measures CPU performance by rendering a photo realistic 3D scene.

As always, Cinebench shows a slight difference between each configuration, in this test the RAM seems to perform best at 2666MHz with our lower timings, likely due to the lower latency.  Let’s see if this becomes a trend.

WINRAR

WinRAR is easily the most well-known file archiving program. In our test we use the application’s built-in benchmark utility in order to determine memory performance.

WinRAR seems to prefer the higher clock speeds, if only slightly. Still, this is definitely looking good so far, as this is in line with some of the better kits we’ve tested.

7-ZIP

7-Zip is an open-source, completely free file archiving application which utilizes LZMA2 compression. We use their built-in bench-marking utility to measure our systems performance when compressing files.

7-Zip is newer to our benchmark suite, and as such we’re still not quite sure what to expect from it. That being said, the Ballistix Elite does do the best we’ve seen thus far.