We are not going to waste too much time on describing these modules – as its RAM. With that being said before we actually get to the meat of the review let’s take a closer look at this kit. First and foremost, Crucial has taken their usual low key, conservative approach to the shipping container / packaging. Basically instead of wasting money on a fancy box and the like this kit comes in a clamshell packaging that is {gasp} actually easy to open.
It is almost as if Crucial doesn’t expect all their potential customers to be criminal’s intent on theft! Instead they have gone with an easy to open package that does protect the ram sticks from most levels of negligent abuse but does so without blocking your view of the sticks. This is something that most RAM kits we have purchased in the past cannot boast about. Brilliant stuff.
Taking a closer look you can see that Crucial has gone with rather beefy and robust heatsinks for their Ballistix Elite series. This certainly is overkill as DDR4 runs at even lower voltages than DDR3, but if you intended the overclock the RAM – as we intend to – the extra mass in these heatsinks will be a welcome addition. If you so choose you can remove the top fin, but this is not recommended as it holds both sides together – and keeps stresses on the individual ICs to a minimum.
Equally impressive is these heatsinks may indeed be robust but they do not add much height nor width to the overall dimensions, instead just like Goldilocks they are just right. Put simply you can easily cram all four into four adjacent slots without worry, and you need not worry about them being so tall that they will block installation of large air based CPU cooling solutions.
With that being said they are taller than standard height RAM modules, so while not tall they are a touch taller. To our way of thinking we would classify these sticks as medium height as they are about 40mm in height compared to 31.25mm for standard height DDR4 RAM. Though to be honest with AIO’s becoming so cheap and powerful the days of worrying about massive heatsinks overhanging the DIMMs on the motherboard are numbered. By the same token this kit is a safe choice and should create almost zero installation issues for most consumers. In testing even massive Prolimatech D15 cooler we able to be used with this kit on both X99 and Z170 systems. That too is something that not every set of RAM can boast.
Now one thing that is readily apparent is that Crucial is being awfully conservative with their default settings. In fact, 16-17-17-36 at DDR4-2666 (at 1.2v) is rather slow compared to some other brands. This however is pretty much Crucial’s ‘MO’ as they prefer to have 100% compatibility that ultra-tight timings out of the box so to speak. To our way of thinking this is a good thing as it does leave room for consumers to tighten things up and yet guarantees that you can plop these sticks into any DDR4 compatible rig and power right up. We have lost count of the number of times we have to use ‘safe’ RAM to dial in the settings, power a system down and then install the ‘real’ RAM before being able to complete the build so the route Crucial takes is the better route. As we will show these sticks are capable of much more so this really is a case of Crucial being conservative rather than Crucial using suboptimal RAM ICs!
