Overclocking
Disclaimer: Overclocking is never guaranteed so that the results may vary depending on certain conditions and various hardware configurations. I am not recommending overclocking if you do not know what are you doing. High voltages may damage hardware, and it will not be covered by warranty.
Overclocking is never guaranteed but with the Ballistix Elite, I had enough luck to say that pretty much every DDR4-3600 or DDR4-4000 kit can make at least DDR4-4600 at CL18. For that will be required a good motherboard but even lower gaming series like Asrock’s Extreme4 can handle the DDR4-4800. Brands like ASRock or ASUS already provide overclocking profiles for Micron E-die IC which is used in the Ballistix Elite so it’s even easier to figure out optimal overclocking settings.
Most Micron E chips will scale at CL18 up to at least DDR4-4600. Better kits will make DDR4-4800 or even 5000. So far the best Micron E chips can be found in the Ballistix Elite DDR4-4000.
Below is our result at the DDR4-4800 CL18-22-22 1.55V which was used in performance comparison in this review. Typical settings at DDR4-4600 or 4800 are CL18-24-24. Motherboards should set optimal sub-timings. The only downside if this IC is that sub-timings can’t be tightened much more manually. On the other hand, most users won’t need that.
The maximum setting on our memory kit is DDR4-5000 CL18-21-21 1.60V. The voltage is already quite high and I’m not recommending to use it for longer but it shows that as long as the CPU’s memory controller is strong enough then this memory can make much more, maybe even up to the world’s record mark! We have to remember that the Ballistix Elite made a lot of noise in the last year taking memory overclocking crown two times.
In the future, I will try some more, hopefully with a better memory controller as the memory has huge overclocking potential but my current processors can’t make any higher clock.
I wish all users of the Ballistix Elite to have as much fun as I had while all the tests for this review and not only.
