Overclocking
Overclocking is never guaranteed so the presented results may vary from results on other memory kits. 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.
All overclocking results were performed on the ASUS Rampage V Extreme motherboard with the latest BIOS and i7 5820K CPU. It’s one of the most popular X99 overclocking platforms.
Looking at the default specification of Crucial Ballistix Elite DDR4-2666 CL16 we can say it’s not any special, even though its also not bad. However additional tests are showing us how high overclocking potential has this memory.
I was able to set our review kit at DDR4-3000 CL13-13-13 using voltage below 1.4V what is great result and not many other DDR4 kits can make the same. This setting wasn’t fully stable but was good enough to pass all benchmarks.
Memory bandwidth for this setting can be seen below.
Also HyperPi 32M result at the same settings which you can find in the AIDA64 DRAM Timings table.
More overclocking results are in the table below. All presented settings passed HyperPi 32M, 3DMarks and couple of additional tests. Even though I haven’t seen any problems during longer tests then not all of them can be considered as fully stable without additional longer tests.
Comparing below results I think that DDR4-2800 CL15 1.20V setting will be optimal without need to raise voltage.
At the end of this part of the review there is one thing about which I mentioned earlier and I think some readers wish to see. I mean temperature of DDR4 modules under load and after overvoltage.
Please take a look at the results made under load using AIDA64 memory and cache stability test. First screenshot is showing temperature under load at 1.20V so default for DDR4 modules. Second screenshot is showing the same memory settings but at 1.4V. As you see difference is not much higher than 2°C. Even though raising voltage too much isn’t safe for memory itself then we can be sure that temperature of our DDR4 modules isn’t too high even after overclocking at higher voltages.
AIDA64 software is showing memory voltage during tests. Idle temperature for both settings was about 29°C.
If you’ve purchased Crucial Ballistix Elite memory and tried overclocking then don’t hesitate to share your results on our forums.
