The stock/factory performance the Sport LT series offers is best described as classic Ballistix. That is to say a touch on the conservative side. The benefit to this is it does leave room for overclocking enthusiasts to gain a bit more performance without stepping up a price step / model in the Sport LT lineup. Counteracting this is the fact that they are conservative and can be considered at a slight disadvantage compared to other companies who do more aggressive factory binning and ratings. So if you want a plug and play kit that will give you every last ounce of performance ‘out of the box’ the SPORT LT may not be an optimal match. If on the other hand you like to play with your new purchase and like discovering exactly what they can do… you will like the new SPORT LT DDR4 models.
As to specifics on our Ryzen 1 testbed DDR4-3200 (i.e. the rated speed) required 1.36v to obtain the ‘XMP’ timings of 16-18-18. With 1.35v 16-19-19 was found to be entirely stable. Given the fact that our sample is a engineering pre-release / beta sample this small, small variance could easily be explained by this. In either case it is not that concerning. With a hard-limit of 1.4v we were able to reach DDR4-3333 with timings of 16-19-19. Beyond this… well it becomes more a case of our Ryzen 1 CPU’s Integrated Memory Controller being the problem rather than the RAM.
We know this to be the case with this RAM because with our Intel Z370 testbed DDR4-3400 at 16-19-19 was easily obtainable. Equally important is the stock XMP profile was completely stable at its default frequencies, timings and voltages. Overall this is pretty darn good results considering this is Ballistix’s more value orientated ‘Sport’ series.
