Ballistix is a slick looking memory that fails a lot
Written: Aug 12 '07 (Updated Jun 24 '08)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great appearance with gold-painted heat spreaders, cheap with rebates, fast when it works.
Cons: Fails fast and frequently. Runs hot.
The Bottom Line: Not recommended.
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| friendly_jacek's Full Review: Crucial Technology 512 MB PC3200 DDR RAM (bl6464z... |
The review is for the Crucial Technology Ballistix 512 MB PC3200 DDR 400 RAM (BL6464Z402.16TG2Y) purchased as Ballistix 1GB kit (BL2Kit6464Z402 R) from NewEgg for $72 (minus the $40 mail in rebate).
I’m new to the DDR memory as I used Rambus RAM in the last 6 years. Now, Rambus RDRAM is obviously obsolete (but still expensive, but this is a different story). However, it was rock stable with the i850 chipset and I had no problems whatsoever with multiple brands on different machines. I recently acquired an used PC with DDR RAM. I upgraded the existing 512 MB DDR 333 with 1 GB DDR 400 purchasing the above referenced Ballistix 1GB kit. This is the best deal I could find on DDR 400 as DDR is less available than the newer DDR2.
The timing specs of Crucial Technology’s Ballistix is impressive: 2-2-2-6 making it as fast as some of the faster DDR2 RAM (that tend to have longer latency timing). This RAM is also easy to overclock by increasing the clock frequency. Many people run it at the 500 MHz bus speeds making it DDR500 and swear by them. However, here is the bad scoop: many of these memory units failed after months of use. A quick Google search for "Ballistix failure" "Ballistix problems" or similar turns up many forums with tons of people complaining about multiple RMAs on these Ballistix modules of different sizes. Some people blame overclockers and overheating for those failures. Some people though that the previous batch was defective and the newer ones designated 16TG would be good. I thought I would be safe since I was buying the newer 16TG ones and I planned to run them at factory specs only.
I was wrong. After several days of use WITHOUT any tweaking or overclocking, running just at the default setting set by the BIOS, I started having windows crashes and file corruptions. I did lots of things, disk checks, restores, etc, etc, wasted several evenings and finally ran Microsoft memory test and found out one of the sticks was bad with thousands of errors. Reseating and extra cooling did nothing (even though the RAM runs hot, 105F with fan blowing on it). I checked the BIOS setting to make sure that they were not set up incorrectly and I was shocked that the motherboard detected SPD was underclocked with 333 Mhz and 3-3-3-8 timing, voltage was correct (2.7-2.8 V). Either the motherboard (MSI 915PL neo) SPD was messed up or the chips were underclocked from the factory, hard to tell. However, no matter what settings, one stick works (including the factory 400 Mhz and 2-2-2-6 timing) and one is dead. I am returning the set back.
To make the story short, there is a reason why these are on sale, they are bad with high rate of defective modules that fail after varying time in use. Simply, do not buy this memory
Update: The replacement sticks are OK after several months of light use. So, some units are not bad. I'm replacing these anyway to get 2GB of RAM as some games maxed out 1 GB in XP.
Recommended:
No
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friendly_jacek
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Reviews written: 31
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