Up Close & Personal...

After having checked overall view of the Ballistix memory, we will also take a closer look and reveals some more details on the DDR500 modules provided by Crucial. The Ballistix PC-4000, as with other Ballistix memory modules come with aluminum heat spreaders. These aluminum heat spreaders are the most popular around today since they are being used by almost every major ram manufacturers.

The yellow/gold colored heat spreaders cover the memory chips complete on front and back of the Ballistix PCB. These heat spreader of the Crucial Ballistix line contrasts nicely against the black PCB and lettering. In addition, the PCB Crucial used for their Ballistix series is a black, six layers PCB. On each of the modules the Ballistix logo does stand out to be recognized immediately.

While one side of the memory sticks will only show of the Crucial branding and Ballistix logo, the other side will contain more details on the ram itself. This is done by actually applying some stickers on the heat spreaders with the part number and so on. This is in slight contrast to the engraved Ballistix logo.

Yeah I couldn't get enough of these Crucial sticks so I didn't want to keep this one for myself. The above clearly shows of how good these memory sticks look and shine towards the light. Again you can get a good view on the nice labeling done by Crucial. It is interesting to note that the heat spreaders don't convey the memory speed or timings, just a part number suffices. I would have thought that some promotion would be in order for this high performance sticks.

The top of the memory modules, where the two parts of the heat spreaders come together, is not completely closed off. This will in part help to facilitate the air flow between the memory chips and the heat spreader. The risk of heat building up gets reduced drastically in this way. The metal clips will keep both parts of the heat spreaders firmly together and will make sure they make close contact with the memory chips.

Now that we got the low down on the cosmetics, we will stuff these bad boys into our MVKTech test system and get the scoop on installation, configuration and performance. I think it's safe to say these will perform right along with the best offerings available in the DDR500 standard. Let's take a look...