Not all that long ago we took a deep dive into the Ballistix Tactical series and walked away impressed with its value. One thing that we briefly touched on was that the Tactical is orientated more towards the value end of the spectrum than performance when compared to the Elite series – as the Elite series really are performance at all cost kits meant for the hardcore crowd. Many readers did ask us what exactly was the real world difference between these two lines are. So today we are going to show exactly what that difference is using a rather impressive kit of Ballistix Elite DDR4-3466 kit of RAM.
On the surface the Elite models are going to be better choice as they are built to a much higher standard. They use heatsinks that are almost thick enough to be considered armor, they undergo a lot more factory testing, and generally speaking are going to be the best choice when price is of only secondary concern. On the other hand they also cost noticeably more – as there is no such thing as a free lunch. For example a Ballistic Tactical DDR4-3000 32GB kit (the fastest in the Tactical line-up) will set buyers back about $340, whereas this Elite kit retails for about 370USD – or about $11.56 cents a Gigabyte, or about a couple cents a GB less than what Corsair and G.Skill are asking for their version. So today we are going to show what that extra up-front cost actually get you.
In typical RHR fashion we are also going to answer another question that many readers asked us. Specifically many, many emails we received was about 32GB kits of RAM and Ryzen. A lot of people simply feel that 16GB is not enough and they need 32GB of random access memory. Almost all of these emails wanted us to show what compromises they would have to accept in order to get 32GB of RAM on their new shiny Ryzen system.
That is not exactly an easy answer as we dislike making any compromises when it comes to performance vs capacity. Yet this is usually what you have to be willing to do if you don’t want to pay the Intel tax. Its ‘common knowledge’ that Ryzen is finicky when it comes to high capacity RAM. Its usually not a ‘plug and play’ solution like it is on Intel. This is because Ryzen is a generation one architecture design that really does appear to be designed with two sticks of 4-8GB DDR4 configurations – whereas Intel is using an 8th generation architecture.
That too is why we reached out to Ballistix and got them to send a set of RAM that conclusively proves that you really don’t have to make compromises on performance vs capacity… you just have to be willing to compromise on your budget.
As we will show you in the coming pages this kit really is something special and really does justify its asking price – which to be fair is actually a couple dollars less than G.Skill or Corsair’s versions. So sit back, relax, and be prepared to be amazed at what a sub-$400 kit of 32GB performance RAM can offer Ryzen owners!
