AMD for the last 2 years or so, is gaining ground over Intel and releasing exciting and interesting stuff in the CPU department. Suffice to say, we have a small surprise on the way as well on the website. Until then, let’s have a look at the overclocking capability on the X399 Threaripper platform with the help of the Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracers RGB. We reviewed this exact DDR4 RAM but just on the LGA 1151 Intel platform. For this test we quadrupled the quantity so we can have 32 GB of RGB glory !
First about Crucial
Crucial is a global brand of Micron Technology, Inc., one of the largest memory and flash storage manufacturers in the world also ranked among the Top 5 Semiconductor producing companies in the world.
They make computer memory upgrades (DRAM) and solid state drives (SSDs), and offer more than 250,000 upgrades for over 50,000 systems.
Prices and Availability
They only come with the grey heatspreader as the external color but are available in two main speed variations (2666 or 3000 MHz). As for kit sizes, you will find them varying from 8 GB all the way up to 64 GB.
We have two kits of 16 GB in our hands but they also do four sticks at a time.
Presentation and Specification
Since we already reviewed them in the past (here), we will just jump in the testing phase.
Testing methodology
We will employ a run of synthetic benchmarks and run some gaming sessions at their stock value of 2666 MHz. Then of course we will see how far we can push them in overclock and compare the differences. We managed 2933 MHz without any increase in voltage. We aimed for 3200 MHz but even with 1.35v it would not even boot even with new timing at 16-19-19-38 (2T). Not even 3000 MHz. So we settled for 2933 MHz. All of these while the CPU was overclocked at 4.0 GHz at 1.25v with a VSOC of 1.10v.
Hardware used:
– CPU: AMD 1900x Threadripper – 8c/16t – OC’d at 4.0 Ghz @ 1.250v
– CPU Cooling: Be Quiet! Silent Loop 360 AIO
– Motherboard: ASUS Zenith X399 Extreme E-ATX – BIOS v1402
– SSD: Samsung 840 Pro 128 GB MLC
– Video card(s): EVGA GTX 960 SSC 2G – then OC’d at +150 MHz Core +50 MHz Memory
– PSU: Be Quiet! Straight Power 11 850W
Software:
– Windows 10 Pro x64 Version 1803
– NVIDIA GeForce WHQL 416.16
– MSI Afterburner v4.50 – To record the FPS and load/temperatures
– CPU-Z v1.86 – To verify the CPU’s and RAM’s statistics
– Aida64 Extreme v5.98 – Memory analysis and Benchmark suite
– Cinebench R15 – Popular CPU benchmark
– Games (Witcher 3 and Rise Of The Tomb Raider) – Set at FHD at “High” settings
Testing and Results
We start with the integrated memory benchmark from AIDA64 so we can see the bandwidth. The first pictures is at 2666 MHz while in the next we have the overclock – 2933 MHz without any increase in voltage.
Next up is a run in Cinebench R15. While this is a CPU bound test, we know that AMD’s Ryzen CPUs will get some gains from higher frequency RAM.
As for the games, we have a look at Witcher 3. Quality settings were set at “High”.
Rise of the Tomb Raider shows as well minimal gains.
Now let’s give all of these numbers a perspective.
Analysis
Surprised to see that on first boot they run at the advertised frequency of 2666 MHz. When compered with Intel XMP 2.0, where you have to activate it fist and until then they run at 2133 MHz. As for synthetic results, we saw gains in AIDA64 up to 8-9% in increased bandwidth and even a lower 6% latency at the same timings and voltage. That is really good. But in games we had very small gains almost close to the margin of error under 2 frames per second. With more fine tuning and trail and error and maybe with a newer bios, we think these could go even higher.
Conclusion
Despite the fact that more sticks of RAM will make overclocking harder, still, in our tests we managed to obtain higher frequencies even with an already OC’ed CPU and without even touching the voltage and timings. That’s really good ! As per our last review on the Intel platform, we can (re)confirm the same findings, that these DDR4 kits from Crucial, are not only good looking, functional and have a minimal height footprint but also deliver great performance !
The good:
+ Very good performance out of the box
+ Great overclock numbers (+8%) without increase in voltage
+ Lifetime warranty
+ Maximum eye candy with the RGB lights
+ Full control of the light show
+ Superb build quality
+ Removable light bar for own 3D-printed creations
The bad:
– Expensive
– They should offer higher frequencies kits out of the box since other manufactures are already going beyond 4xxx MHz stock
Glob3trotters “Performance” Award – 4.5 out 5
Many thanks for Crucial for supplying us this rainbow !
