Up Close & Personal...

Now that we have had a quick look at the Ballistix Tracer memory, we will go and take a closer look and check some features a bit in more detail. The Ballistix Tracer 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 black heat spreaders cover the memory chips completely on front and back of the Ballistix Tracer PCB. These heat spreaders of the Crucial Tracer line do go nicely with the black PCB and lettering. The PCB Crucial used for their Ballistix Tracer series is a black, six layers PCB. On each of the modules the Ballistix Tracer logo does stand out to be recognized immediately. The color scheme used is quite simple though very effective.

When speaking about dual channel, that includes two memory sticks of the same speed and specifications. Crucial has adapted to that way of providing their memory modules by shipping these in matched pairs. 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 these high performance sticks. But nonetheless these sticks do look very neat.

At first glance the memory looks pretty much like every other DDR DIMM on the market, but upon closer inspection we can clearly see the LED's on top and near the pins. The ones on the bottom glow a nice blue on both sides, the LED's on the top alternate red and green in color. The memory activity is represented through its assortment of red and green LED's. The busier each stick of Tracer DDR is, the faster the LED's blink and flash. When there's little to no activity, the LED's only cycle slowly.

The Tracer's LED's and the circuitry that controls them are powered directly from the modules power supply. This may sound alarming, but it is nothing to worry about. The Tracer memory does not require more voltage than their standard Ballistix counterpart. However, the LED's will glow at different brightness levels depending on how much voltage is applied to the memory modules, i.e. 2.8V will glow brighter than 2.5V. Crucial does strongly warn users not to go crazy with this; it is not recommended to operate this memory over 2.8V because this could cause damage to the memory modules.

As the memory works, two lights zip across in opposite directions, with the speed of the motion being indicative of the workload on the memory. The bottom of the sticks are equipped with a set of blue LED's that serve to light up your motherboard's memory slots. These are pretty neat features, especially if you have a case with a window and are bent on showing off every cool aspect of your system. A very nice Crucial feature that we can certainly appreciate!