Be it your neighbor, friend, or just someone talking about their computer to others one of the most common questions over the years has been "How much RAM does your machine contain?" Of course advanced users would add to this by being interested not solely in size but also type as a method to determine which is faster, yours or mine. Most people old enough will remember the days when SIMM's ruled and be it the 30pin or 72pin variety they were everywhere. By today's standards their capability of controlling bits and bytes is best described as the dark ages of personal computing, an era certainly before we knew full speed L2 cache let alone authentic 3D graphics. Hardly anyone is brave enough these days to comment on how much memory our systems will need into the future, Bill Gate’s 640K famous response some 20 years ago turned out invalid but that's because no one imagined software to act and look the way it does in our modern society. Today we use systems with memory almost overflowing and the recent trend is not its size but quality of service. In this review we look at one of these quality products from Crucial, their Ballistix series DDR PC3200 memory that is aimed at PC enthusiasts who envy performance above all. To produce this review Crucial shipped us a quantity of 2x512MB modules for evaluation.

First Impressions

Anyone common to Crucial will be familiar with their appearance of packaging. While it isn't designed to be flashy it does serve its purpose well and for the environmentally concerned is made mostly out of recycled cardboard. Inside we find the memory sealed in an anti-static envelope, some sponge to absorb shocks in transit, a large & small Ballistix case sticker, and finally also a handy small sized installation manual. Taking out the memory reveals its copper heat spreaders common on performance memory products - a feature included to serve both cooling and cosmetic functions. To clearly identify them from other Crucial memory as well as competition they contain a Ballistix logo sticker on the heat spreader. THE PCB color of the DIMM's is black making a change from the otherwise common green, whether this is something good or bad however remains a matter of personal preference.

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