Extreme Performance & Overclocking

Well, we just figured to go one step further and check what more is possible with the Ballistix Edition series from Crucial Technology, because maybe there is more left in this memory than we might think. This will actually be done in two ways, either by overclocking the memory speed or by overclocking the Intel processor. Both should show an increase in performance, so we will check what the exact impact is for these Ballistix Edition memory sticks. This time we will be using SiSoftware Sandra to provide us the memory bandwidth raw power indication. We did quite some benchmarks, and start each of these at the nominal 1000MHz memory clock speed.

Memory Bandwidth (PC2-8000 1000MHz - E6300 2.10GHz - 5-6-6-18)

Memory Bandwidth (PC2-8000 1000MHz - E6300 2.10GHz - 5-5-5-15)

Memory Bandwidth (PC2-8000 1000MHz - E6300 2.10GHz - 5-4-4-14)

We are actually taking a dual approach as we are both overclocking our Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 processor and playing with the memory timings. Starting at the default settings of 2.10GHz for the Core 2 Duo CPU and 1000MHz memory clock speed, we can see that by decreasing the latencies that the bandwidth is showing a slight boost as well. This means however that we do not touch the bus speed, but rather lowering the timings which has a positive effect on performance of the Crucial Ballistix memory. We want to point out that we set the memory voltage a bit higher as well, and by doing so it reached its limit of 5-4-4-14 at 2.2V.

Our second overclocking attempt already starts a bit further. We configured our system this way that we could once again start at 1000MHz memory speed but with the Core 2 Duo already overclocked to 2.33GHz. We will now repeat the same logic as above and see what that means in raw performance of the Crucial Ballistix PC2-8000 Edition dual channel memory kit. By decreasing the memory timings, we will find out the maximum performance of these Ballistix series memory modules.

Memory Bandwidth (PC2-8000 1000MHz - E6300 2.33GHz -5-6-6-18)

Memory Bandwidth (PC2-8000 1000MHz - E6300 2.33GHz - 5-5-5-15)

Memory Bandwidth (PC2-8000 1000MHz - E6300 2.33GHz - 5-4-4-14)

Yeah these Crucial Ballistix Edition sticks keep amazing us with their top notch performance. Having decreased the memory latencies to 5-4-4-14 and also upped the Core 2 Duo E6300 to 2.33GHz the bandwidth boost is just unbelievable. We notice a significant gain of about 500MB/s from our default configuration to our nicely overclocked system. These memory sticks just blew us away. And if you are really looking for high performance DDR2 memory, then you should look any further... Just check out these performance edition series from Crucial and pick up this lovely Ballistix version to power your system!