Once upon a time, 2666MHz or 3000MHz memory was ample for most users but an insatiable appetite for speed within the enthusiast sector allows manufacturers to stretch their legs from time to time. Here we have a 4000MHz kit from Crucial, but what difference does it actually make? Let’s find out.
Product on Review: Crucial Ballistix Elite 4000
Manufacturer: Crucial
Street Price: £219.99 / $239.99
Crucial, a Micron company, have been a leader within the DRAM market for years now, producing everything from budget DIMMs for office-based systems to DIMMs adorned in RGB lighting.
Last month we saw the launch of AMD’s 3rd Gen. processors, with a new and improved memory controller allowing manufacturers of DRAM to stretch their legs and develop high speed kits for the masses. Crucial were quick off the mark as today we look at the Crucial Ballistix Elite in the brand new 4000MHz flavour. Their 3600MHz kits of the very same have won plenty of awards as well as the current DDR4 frequency world record at 5758MHz from an off-the-shelf 3600MHz Ballistix Elite kit. Overclocking credentials get a massive tick then.
The 4000MHz kit lands with the option of 4GB or 8GB modules allowing you to install up to 32GB in a typical dual-channel system. You can also have any colour you fancy, as long as it’s black. But let’s be honest, for those of you who are more interested in performance than aesthetics, that isn’t a problem at all.
The frequency is well established at 4000MHz but we’ve yet to discuss timings, standing at 18-19-19-39, relatively tight timings for such a high frequency so hopefully that can transfer into performance improvements.
Pricing is a little high just now, at £220/$240 for a 16GB kit, though frequency often doesn’t scale with price so that’s to be expected. But enough of that, let’s throw the sticks into our test rig and see how much it can benefit a 3800X.
Crucial on the Ballistix Elite:
Open fire before your opponents even pull the trigger. Overwhelm them with unthinkable speed. And draw on the improved responsiveness, increased frame rates, and optimized latencies of Ballistix Elite Series memory for an unreal gaming experience. Engineered for pros and overclockers to push the fastest platforms to the edge, the Elite Series fuels hardcore processors and crushes the memory bottleneck with some of the fastest speeds and bandwidths available.
Technical Specifications
Brand: Ballistix
Warranty: Limited Lifetime
Specs: DDR4 PC4-32000 – 18-19-19-39 – Unbuffered – NON-ECC – DDR4-4000 – 1.35v – 1024Meg x 64
Series: Ballistix Elite
Form Factor: UDIMM
Total Capacity: 16GB
Speed: 4000 MT/s
DIMM Type: Unbuffered
ECC: NON-ECC
Voltage: 1.35v
Warranty: Limited Lifetime
Specs: DDR4 PC4-32000 – 18-19-19-39 – Unbuffered – NON-ECC – DDR4-4000 – 1.35v – 1024Meg x 64
Series: Ballistix Elite
Form Factor: UDIMM
Total Capacity: 16GB
Speed: 4000 MT/s
DIMM Type: Unbuffered
ECC: NON-ECC
Voltage: 1.35v
Packaging & Product
Crucial have designed the packaging to look like steel checker plating. The sticker at the top tells you capacity, frequency and voltage.
Lifting away the magnetic lid, there’s a motivational message within and some social media links but nothing really meaningful.
The reverse side doesn’t give any specifics whatsoever, just generalisations about the Ballistix brand as a whole.
The front and back of the modules are covered by multi-layered metal heatsinks with a considerable heft. They’re definitely the heaviest modules we’ve handled for a while. Crucial have also done the user a favour and made the warranty/info stickers as small as possible and moved them to one end of the DIMMs, that’s a nice touch.
Test Setup & Software
Our test system is formatted and a fresh version of Windows is installed with just drives in place – no additional applications. Windows is then updated to the latest release and the drivers are installed.Included in the list of benchmarks are the following applications:
Benchmarks:
AIDA64
SiSoftware SANDRA
Cinebench R20
PCMark 8 Photoshop
Rise of the Tomb Raider
War Thunder
SiSoftware SANDRA
Cinebench R20
PCMark 8 Photoshop
Rise of the Tomb Raider
War Thunder
Test system:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3800X
Motherboard: MSI Prestige X570 Creation
Graphics: AMD Radeon RX480
Memory:
PSU: Corsair RM750x
OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit
Monitor: ASUS ROG PG279Q
Motherboard: MSI Prestige X570 Creation
Graphics: AMD Radeon RX480
Memory:
PSU: Corsair RM750x
OS: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit
Monitor: ASUS ROG PG279Q
Memory Transfer Performance – AIDA64
AIDA64 Product PageMemory bandwidth benchmarks (Memory Read, Memory Write, Memory Copy) measure the maximum achiveable memory data transfer bandwidth. The code behind these benchmark methods are written in Assembly and they are extremely optimized for every popular AMD, Intel and VIA processor core variants by utilizing the appropriate x86/x64, x87, MMX, MMX+, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2, SSE4.1, AVX, and AVX2 instruction set extension.
The Memory Latency benchmark measures the typical delay when the CPU reads data from system memory. Memory latency time means the penalty measured from the issuing of the read command until the data arrives to the integer registers of the CPU.
The Memory Latency benchmark measures the typical delay when the CPU reads data from system memory. Memory latency time means the penalty measured from the issuing of the read command until the data arrives to the integer registers of the CPU.
Bandwidth Performance – SiSoftware SANDRA
SANDRA isn’t always a benchmark that is included in hardware reviews but I believe it shouldn’t be ignored. SANDRA provides a vigorous package that tests your system in a rather large array of benchmarks. There are many aspects of benchmark that can be executed.
Processing Power Performance – Cinebench R20
Cinebench is a real-world cross-platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s hardware capabilities. Improvements to Cinebench Release 20 reflect the overall advancements to CPU and rendering technology in recent years, providing a more accurate measurement of Cinema 4D’s ability to take advantage of multiple CPU cores and modern processor features available to the average user.
Image Editing Performance – PC Mark 8 Photoshop
PCMark 8 Product Page Developed in partnership with Benchmark Development Program members Acer, AMD, Condusiv Technologies, Dell, HGST, HP, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Samsung, SanDisk, Seagate and Western Digital, PCMark 8 is the latest version in FutureMark’s popular series of PC benchmarking tools. Improving on previous releases, PCMark 8 includes new tests using popular applications from Adobe and Microsoft.
Gaming Performance – Rise of the Tomb Raider & War Thunder
To test out the benefit of faster memory in a real world scenario, we have taken a recent game and created a CPU limited scenario by reducing the resolution and graphics settings to minimum, while setting the CPU dependent settings at their highest.
Conclusion
As far as performance is concerned, the Ballistix Elite ticks many boxes, but our graphs unfortunately don’t paint the full picture and we’ll go on to explain why.Firstly, you will notice that our AIDA64 memory tests show the kit in a distinctly positive light, achieving strong results in all of the throughput tests. However the 18-19-19-39 timings, compared to tighter offerings further down the frequency scale, do hinder it somewhat in the latency tests. Everything is ‘as expected’ so far, but then if we move onto the Cinebench or gaming tests some disparity arrives.
To explain this, we first need to briefly go over two major AMD Ryzen 3000-series clock domains. Communication between cores and dies – notably the CCD and IOD – is over Infinity Fabric, while memory and the IOD communicate at DRAM speeds. Infinity Fabric is synced to the underlying DRAM clock in a 1:1 ratio, i.e. a 3000MHz RAM kit (or more precisely a 3000 MT/s kit) would operate at 1500MHz, and Infinity Fabric would also run at 1500MHz.
To ensure stability within the system AMD have set a ceiling limit of 1866MHz for the Infinity Fabric, an effective DRAM frequency of 3722MHz. If this is exceeded then the Infinity Fabric operating frequency steps down via a 1:2 ratio.
Now, with that out of the way, we can expect the AMD Ryzen 3800X in our test rig to be running a 1000MHz IF and 2000MHz(x2) on the memory, for a 4000MHz effective DDR frequency. This has a knock-on effect to the processor’s performance compared to a kit running at, or close to, the CPUs ‘sweet spot’ of 3600-3733MHz memory.
Of course, something that can be done to remedy the situation is to drop the DRAM frequency to 3600MHz, re-engaging that 1:1 frequency but then why wouldn’t you just save some money and buy Crucial’s 3600MHz kit with tighter timings straight out of the box? Within the motherboard BIOS is the option to manually engage the 1:1 ratio but that brings with it stability concerns and there’s no guarantees that your processor would run happily at 2000MHz – after all, AMD have put the Infinity Fabric frequency ceiling in place for a reason.
There’s no RGB lighting to worry about, throughput thanks to the 4000MHz frequency will definitely have its benefits in specific scenarios, but giving up on gaming performance by hampering the CPU isn’t ideal.
At £220 in the UK and $240 in the US, the Ballistix Elite is a bit above where we expected to see it. Similar kits, equipped with a substantial heatsink and with identical DRAM timings, can be found for nearly £50 less.
Crucial’s Ballistix Elite 4000MHz kit is blazing fast and looks great but they’re currently far too expensive for us to recommend.
Pros
+ Lovely aesthetics
+ Hefty heatsinks on each module
+ Backed by lifetime warranty
+ Good throughput thanks to 4000MT/s speeds
Cons
– Costly
– Doesn’t compliment AMD Ryzen 3000-series CPUs well
+ Lovely aesthetics
+ Hefty heatsinks on each module
+ Backed by lifetime warranty
+ Good throughput thanks to 4000MT/s speeds
Cons
– Costly
– Doesn’t compliment AMD Ryzen 3000-series CPUs well
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