Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4 16GB 2666MHz Memory Kit Review

Crucial Ballistix Elite 2666MHz DDR4 Memory Overclocking:

How tight can we get the timings on the Crucial Ballistix 16GB 2666MHz DDR4 memory kit and how far can it be overclocked with 1.35V of memory? We wanted to see just how much overhead Crucial left in the Ballistix Elite 16GB 2666MHz DDR4 memory kit (BLE4K4G4D26AFEA).

The kit starts off at 2666MHz with 16-17-17-26 2T timings at 1.20V.

We bumped up the voltage to 1.35V and got down to 11-10-10-28 with a 1T command rate at 2400MHz. We tried to get 10-10-10 to work at 2666MHz, but the test system would fail to successfully load Windows 8.1. We are ecstatic to get CL11 timings from this kit though and 11-10-10 timings at 2666MHz is much lower than anything you can buy on the market.

When it comes to increasing the overall memory clock speed we used memory dividers to overclock and we weren’t able to get 2800MHz or anything higher stable at 1.20V with the stock timings. We were able to get 2800MHz and 3000MHz 99% stable with the stock timings of 16-17-17-36 2T by increasing the DRAM voltage up to 1.45V. We were not able to get the 3000MHz with the 1T command rate to boot into Windows successfully and we even tried 1.5V. The scores we were seeing in the benchmarks at 3000MHz with CL16 timings were slower than that of 2666MHz with CL11 timings to top it off.

Since most people aren’t going to increase the voltage on their memory we are going to focus our testing on the stock speeds at both CL16 and CL11 timings.