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 Crucial is back again with their Ballistix line of memory. This time their highest performing DDR2 Ballistix is the PC2-5300. The memory is rated to run 331MHz with latencies of 4-4-4-10 and a voltage of 1.9v. Sadly, the PC2-5300 Ballistix is only rated to run 331MHz instead of the "normal" competition of 337MHz. But during testing, I've found it to run 337MHz easily and will keep the frequency for the sake of testing purposes. The memory comes with a beautiful blend of gold heatspreaders and black PCB. Although the heatspreaders don't have much looks to them, it's only there for cosmetics anyway. I can't really complain about that. Looks are looks. The black PCB is a nice touch away from the norm of plain looking green PCBs seen all over the place. Like the Kingston HyperX PC2-5400, the Ballistix PC2-5300 comes rated with latencies of 4-4-4-10. This is lower than the majority but it requires you to run at a lower frequency. I ran it at 337MHz like the rest of the competition and found that the latencies were able to hold up and keep things stable. I guess you can say that this memory is indeed able to perform just like regular PC2-5400 but with lower latencies. The Ballistix PC2-5300 overclocked well but not as great as I had expected it to. The lowest latencies achieved were 3-3-3-8 at 266MHz. Running at 337MHz, the latencies only improved slightly after some manual adjustments, reaching 4-4-3-10. The memory also was able to reach the motherboard limit of 265FSB; and much like the Kingston HyperX PC2-5400, it ran 354MHz with latencies of 4-4-4-10. This is all with the rated voltage of 1.9v. The Ballistix memory sure didn't fail to impress even with the slightly lower overclocking potential. The performance of the memory was superb.
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