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Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR PC4000 Review
Testing, Value & Conclusion »Introduction
First we would like to thank Crucial Europe for supplying us with this memory.Crucial is a division of micron. They build their own Chips and PCB, not like all the other manufacturers who have the DDR-Ram only soldered together and referred their chips and PCBs by other manufacturers. On the Tracer PC4000 are also unique leds for a good look. Although Crucial/Micron is not normally known as overlocking ram we will do an extreme overclocking test with high voltages and try to find out if they are a good alternative to Ram with Samsung TCCDs or low latency like Winbond UTT BH-5/CH-5.
The chips are getting really hot, so beware for giving to much voltage! Around 3.0-3.1V looks fine for me.
Specification
| Clock Speeds: | 250MHz |
|---|---|
| CAS Latency (Tcl) | 2.5 |
| RAS-to-CAS Delay (Trcd) | 4 |
| RAS Precharge (Trp) | 4 |
| Cycle Time | 8 |
| Voltage | 2.6V +/- 0.2V |
| Package | TSOP |
LEDs
Here you can download a small Video (5.1 MB) of the Tracers in action.
Here you can see the system we tested on.
| Test System | |
|---|---|
| CPU: | AMD Athlon64 3200+ (S939; 512KB; Winchester) |
| Motherboard: | DFI Lanparty nForce4 Ultra-D |
| Memory: | 2 x 512MB Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR PC4000 |
| Video Card: | Connect3D X850XT@ 520/540MHz |
| Harddisk: | 1 x Maxtor Diamond Max 10 160GB |
| Power Supply: | OCZ ADJ 420W |
| Software: | Windows XP Prof. , Catalyst 5.8 |
All parts are selected with high performance and good overclockability in mind to reach high test results. We used BIOS 704-2BT for the DFI Lanparty nForce4 SLI-D.
All AlphaTimings in the Bios are set to auto, except for:
- CPC - Enabled
- DRAM bank Interleaving - Enabled
- Idle Cycle Limit - 256
- Dynamic Counter - Disabled
- R/W Queue Bypass - 16x
- Bypass Max - 07x.
- TRAS always at 7, this gives highest memory bandwith when used with the Integrated Memory Controller (IMC) of the Athlon64.