Crucial Ballistix MAX DDR4-4400 CL19 16GB RAM Kit Review

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Conclusion

Sometimes you just want your RAM to go faster, or at least have more options and flexibility when it comes to frequency, mega-transfers per second, latency, and Voltage tolerances.  This is where Crucial’s Ballistix MAX gaming memory comes into play.  This RAM is made for hardcore gamers and hardware enthusiasts who like to tweak their system and maximize memory performance.  This RAM can tolerate higher Voltages and heat dissipation to push frequency.

Today we reviewed the Crucial Ballistix MAX 16GB Kit (2 x 8GB) DDR4-4400 Desktop Gaming Memory (Black) kit for $202.99 MSRP.  This kit includes two 8GB DDR4-4400 PC4-35200 CL19 memory modules for 16GB total in dual-channel.  It’s a great kit for any AMD Ryzen system or Intel system using DDR4.  It comes with timings of 19-19-19-46 CR 1T at 1.4V.

Because it is speced to run at DDR4-4400, it does need a higher Voltage than you will find with DDR4-3600 modules, but this kit can take it, it’s rated for it in the profiles.  That frequency though also comes with the caveat of slower timings, CL19 in this case, versus CL16 on DDR-3600.  However, that difference can be easily made up with this RAM by overclocking the FCLK frequency on AMD Ryzen systems to closer bring it into parity with the Infinity Fabric, which as we found out brings significant performance boosts.

Performance

When it came to performance, just setting the RAM to its XMP or D.O.C.P. profile alone will provide the biggest boost to performance.  This RAM can run at DDR4-4400 and CL19, so why not set it and make it go.  The one downside is that you will not have that 1:1 ratio with the FCLK/Uncore, but that can be solved somewhat manually. 

We saw bandwidth increases of 30% more read bandwidth and 35% more write bandwidth as well as 46% more copy performance.  In SiSoftware Sandra 2021 we experienced a 37% performance improvement, and in PassMark a 17% improvement.

The real advantage with this RAM was when we tried to bring our FCLK frequency up to memory speed, which would have been 2200MHz, but on our platform, we got it up to 2000MHz.  This resulted in the largest performance increases with the RAM.  Read performance bandwidth went up another 9%, write performance was up 11% and copy performance was up 3%.  SiSoftware Sandra 2021 saw a 2.3% boost with the overclock and PassMark received a 1% improvement.

We also experienced some good latency improvements using D.O.C.P. versus the default setting.  At DDR4-4400 and CL19 latency improved quite a bit.  Increasing the frequency to DDR4-4600 also helped, but once again the largest latency improvements came by way of increasing the FCLK frequency.

Overclocking

The Crucial Ballistix MAX gave us a couple of options in how we wanted to approach overclocking.  We could try and push the frequency, by increasing Voltage, or we could leave all of that alone and raise the FCLK frequency instead of trying to match it as close as we can to the memory clock.  This method overall yielded the best result.

The perfect setting at DDR4-4400 would have been FCLK frequency at 2200MHz, but our system wasn’t up to the task.  Instead, we managed 2000MHz.  However, that made a huge difference in our bandwidth performance, read, write and copy.  It also produced the lowest latencies.

When we tried to raise the frequency, we found that DDR4-4600 does work for the most part at the default timings, but you will have to raise the Voltage to at least 1.45V.  Even then, our configuration wasn’t 100% without errors.  In reality, it turns out we could overclock the RAM to just DDR4-4466 at default Voltage and receive no errors in TestMem.  At that small frequency increase, it isn’t worth it. 

It’s clear that to get the most from RAM with a frequency as high as 4400MHz, on AMD Ryzen platforms you also want to raise the FCLK frequency as much as you can.  That alone will give you the best performance boost with your RAM.  That is something we could not achieve on the Ballistix DDR4-3600 modules. 

Final Points

Note that we have only tested this RAM on our AMD Ryzen X570 platform, as that is the system we use for such testing. However, this RAM would also work great on Intel DDR4 platforms, as it does support the XMP 2.0 profile and will also run at DDR4-4400 CL19 on those systems as well. In fact, with the way the bus speed works on Intel systems, you don’t have to worry about the Infinity Fabric clock. With different GEAR ratios, you will have multiple options for overclocking as well. The Crucial Ballistix MAX memory kit modules are well suited for both platforms, and we had no troubles on the AMD platform.

The Crucial Ballistix MAX memory modules are definitely geared toward enthusiasts, as they contain temperature sensors embedded, something the Ballistix don’t have. This lets you monitor temperatures and find out if your overvolting or overclocking is too much, and how hot they really are getting. Crucial has a program that will display the temperatures in a graph form and can log the data, but you can also use something like HWiNFO64. This added ability just makes the RAM that much more appealing for enthusiasts.

We found that this RAM does the job quite well, it’s well built, solid, and the heatspreader and aesthetic appearance is appealing to give your computer a nice sleek look. You can choose to go RGB or no RGB. There are varying DDR4 speeds from 4000, or 4400 and differing quantities up to 32GB kits. You will be paying extra for this performance at $202.99, and overclocking flexibility, but if that is something that interests you, just know it will cost a bit more than the Ballistix kits.

Discussion

Brent Justicehttps://www.thefpsreview.com
Former managing editor of GPUs at HardOCP for 18 years, Brent Justice has been reviewing computer components since the late 90s, educated in the art and method of the computer hardware review, he brings experience, knowledge, and hands-on testing with a gamer-oriented and hardware enthusiast perspective. You can follow him on Twitter - @Brent_Justice You can sub to his YouTube channel - Justice Gaming https://www.youtube.com/c/JusticeGamingChannel You can check out his computer builds on KIT - @BrentJustice https://kit.co/BrentJustice

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