Test System & Configuration

Now that we have a good impression of the Crucial Ballistix PC2-8000 Edition memory modules it is about time to check out the performance delivered by these sticks. The system used will be our newly, high performing and major overclockable Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 based test system supporting the DDR2-1000 modules. The system is build around the ASUS P5W Digital Home Deluxe which forms a stable and flexible base during our benchmark run. This is one of the best proofed systems with excellent support for DDR2 memory. So join us and check out the specifications...

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz Dual Core Processor
• ASUS P5W Digital Home Deluxe (i975X) Mainboard
• Crucial Ballistix 2GB PC2-8000 Dual Channel Memory
• Gainward BLISS 7950 GT 512MB Golden Sample
• Western Digital 320GB Caviar SE 8MB Cache Hard Disk
• Zalman ZM460-APS 460W Noiseless (SLI Ready) Power Supply
• Spire Pininfarina SP-ATX-PALU Silver Tower Case
• Sony SDM-HX93/B 19" (Black) LCD Monitor
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional incl. SP2 Edition

Our P5W Digital Home mainboard from ASUS based upon the Intel 975X Express chipset is known to be quite flexible when it comes to DDR2 memory support. The chipset actually works just fine with all speeds ranging from DDR2-533 to DDR2-1000, and even higher. And on top of that, ASUS is known to be a leader when it comes in overclocking and supporting more extra features out of the box. We will power the Intel 975X Express chipset with the Crucial Ballistix PC2-8000 Edition memory sticks. These 240-pin DDR2-1000 modules will run at amazing speeds in any platform you are computing with.

Smooth looks and sleek design, these stick truly fit well into our system. The Crucial Ballistix PC2-8000 Edition dual channel kit installed and ready to kick some benchmarks. The ram sticks just shine in our test rig and do fit nicely with the color scheme of our system. Just notice the reflections on the gold mirror finish of the Ballistix sticks, just awesome. We truly like the look and feel of these Ballistix Edition modules and have only good words for it and high hopes on the performance. Being open at the top, these sticks allow for the heat to spread and the air around being refreshed.

Looking from another angle these ram sticks just look damn nice and very neat. With the all the power cables it's hard to get a good angle on the ram, but I think you get the picture by now. Both sticks have mirrored yellow/gold shading, so we can see some components reflection on it. Due to that it is quite hard as well to get a good shot of these Crucial Ballistix memory sticks as the mirror finish does reflect any light. This should be good news for some case modders who are using some fancy LED's and lighting in their computer case.

CPU-Z 1.38 Information

It comes natural, yes we will fire up the general purpose freeware applications and CPU-Z is one of them. Just recently a new version was released, so we just used that version to show our findings. First off this is how we configured the system. We started out with a slightly overclocked system running at a FSB of 300MHz, which resulted in 1200MHz bus speed for the Intel Core 2 Duo, which is at that point clocked at 2.10GHz. Totally default voltage, with memory timings set to automatic in the system BIOS. Let's pull some stats and see what we got...

When our system has started we load up CPU-Z and get the following detailed information. The initial screen will take us through the processor details of our system. Our central processing unit is an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 Socket 775 which is running at 2.10GHz featuring 2048KB cache. As you can spot we can't select between processors, but in fact we clearly see that there are two cores. Yes as the name Core 2 Duo already indicates itself this is Intel's newest dual core processor. The memory itself was set at default DDR2-1000 settings with the memory timings set by the SPD chip. Now that we have those details lets do a default test and see what we get.