The newest Ballistix RAM has some nice overclocking potential.

It’s a pretty exciting time to be a PC enthusiast right now: a new operating system (Vista) from Microsoft with a new graphical standard (DirectX 10) for games hyped to look more realistic than anything available on a console, a new motherboard chipset (680i) and GPU series (the 8000 series) from NVIDIA that not only support Vista and DirectX 10 but make for the most powerful gaming computers on the planet, all emerging at the same time in a surprisingly coordinated attempt to return PC gaming to parity with, if not dominance over, the enormously successful console market. Accompanying these new standards is a whole host of new hardware designed to power the latest set of dream machines; sorting through that hardware to make sure you know what will work best for you is, as always, my appointed task.

Today we’ll be looking at the newest member of the Ballistix line of memory from Crucial. Ballistix, aimed at enthusiasts, comes in two flavors: standard and Tracer, which features a string of green and red LEDs on the top of the chips that blink on and off in response to activity and a group of always-on blue LEDs near the pins, making a nice addition to any gamer’s windowed case. Both types include heat spreaders (yellow for standard, black for Tracer) and now meet the PC2-8500 specification for DDR2, running at 1066 MHz with 5-5-5-15 timings (complete specifications available here). As a result, the new Ballistix RAM can take advantage of the additional memory bandwidth in the 680i chipset, but is the increase performance worth your hard-won buck? Let’s find out.

Performance
As in the previous generation of Ballistix memory, the PC2-8500 generation features Enhanced Performance Profiles (EPPs), an overclocking standard that allows quick selection of pre-determined overclocking profiles in the BIOS, giving your computer a performance boost without fiddling around with complicated memory timings. EPPs are an excellent idea made slightly duplicative by NVIDIA’s Tune System utility (more on that below), but they do give you an additional weapon in your performance arsenal to try out, should you have the desire. However, I won’t be able to test their performance today: in a rare case (recently) of technology not keeping step with itself, the 680i LT chipset that powers my motherboard only supports PC2-8000 EPP RAM; plug in the new generation of PC-8500 EPP RAM and you’ll have to tweak the timings yourself. Want support for new EPP-enabled RAM in your new motherboard? You’ll need to lay down the extra money for a 680i board instead, or wait for future BIOS updates that may remove this limitation. For now I’ll give you the test results of other overclocking methods.