Crucial Ballistix PC2-6400 2GB LED Kit Performance

Performance

Real world applications like word processing and composing email do not require large amounts of memory usually and therefore do not tell us much about memory performance. Video editing, audio recording and gaming (on the other hand) do. So I am using Cakewalk Sonar 6 Producer Edition, ULead Video Studio 11 and some of my favorite 3D games to see how the memory performs for multimedia.

The computer used to test the memory is set up with a dual operating system using Windows XP Pro SP/2 and Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit Edition. My upgrade is intended to max out the system memory on this computer to achieve maximum performance for multimedia tasks. While Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit Edition recognizes and uses the entire 4GB of RAM, Windows XP Pro SP/2 only recognizes 3.25GB of system RAM. I have yet to get Sandra to run properly with my Vista installation so the following benchmarks were performed in Windows XP Pro SP/2. While Windows does not use the entire 4GB of RAM, Sandra does see it as installed but only benchmarks the 3.25GB used by Windows.

If you wish to use 4GB or more system memory, you should install a 64-bit operating system to be able to use all of it.

Benchmarks

All Benchmarks were run on the same system as per specifications below.

• Processor: Pentium D 3.4GHz

• Motherboard: ECS NF650iSLIT-A

• Graphics: EVGA e-GeForce 7900GS KO 256MB

• Sound: SoundBlaster Audigy2

• Hard Disk: Maxtor 300GB SATA II

• Memory: 2x1GB Crucial Ballistix Tracer 240-Pin DDR2 PC2-6400 (2.2v)

• CPU Cooler: Thermaltake TMG i2

All testing was done with the memory running at 2.2v, which is the stock voltage. Trying to adjust the voltage to less than 2.2v resulted in system instability.

Up first are the results of the SiSoft Sandra testing for overclocked speeds:

As you can see I increased the front side bus as well as the memory speed during the overclock and the only problem I ran into was instability on the part of my processor. The Pentium D 3.4GHz processor ran stable up to a 900MHz bus speed but at 933MHz it became unstable and I had to clock it back down to 900. The Ballistix performed extremely well at 950Mhz and I am pretty sure it could run stable at 1GHz with no problems. However the benefit of overclocking the memory alone is minimal. If you plan to overclock the memory you should have a processor capable of running at approximately the same bus speed to gain the full benefit of overclocking.

With the processor running at 3.83GHz on a 900MHz bus and the memory running at 950MHz, I was able to run all of my games and crucial multimedia program without any problems. In fact, I noticed a significant increase in my graphics performance in many 3D games and faster rendering time in video editing as well with this configuration.

* Note that the FSB speeds were also incrementally increased for the testing, with the exception of the last test. The FSB speeds were 833 MHz, 866 MHz, 933 MHz and 900 MHz respectively.

Next up is the comparison of the OCZ Platinum memory to the Crucial Ballistix:

As you can see, at PC2-6400 speeds there is really no difference between the two sets of memory.

Finally, when using all 4GB of memory the real life performance gain was noticeable but not as much as I would have thought. However, in Windows Vista 64-bit the performance gain was very noticeable and greatly increased the speed of multitasking and gaming.