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It is only human to want to get more out of something. Nothing is ever good enough, no matter how good it is -- computers are no exception. I'm sure we've all heard the expression "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" before, but who really takes that to heart? "If it ain't broke, make it better" is what I live by, as do many other enthusiasts.

Overclocking has had such an impact on the PC industry in the last five years that there are companies out there whose sole business plan is the manufacturing and sale of high-performance parts purely for the enthusiast market. Certain other companies have R&D departments dedicated for the purpose of tweaking and putting out products for this same market.

In the last few years, Crucial has made a name for itself by being the provider of high quality memory. Crucial is one of the names that immediately comes up when naming off brands of quality RAM. In the last year, Crucial has extended its quality and reputation traits to include high-performance memory for overclockers and enthusiasts alike

Today, we will be reviewing Crucial's new series of high-performance RAM, dubbed "Ballistix". We have a pair of 512 MB sticks rated at PC4000 (250 MHz) that we will be putting to task on Gigabyte's nForce 4 SLI motherboard.

The Memory

Crucial's Ballistix memory comes wrapped in matte-black heatspreaders on both sides, with wide silver clips holding the heatspreaders in place. These are the higher quality clips that we've praised before, not the flimsy clips used on earlier generation heatspreaders. The PCB is black and shiny. Nice :)

At the top of the memory sticks are a set of activity-indicator LEDs (two rows of 8 LEDs each). As the memory works, two lights zip across in opposite directions, with the speed of the motion being indicative of the workload on the memory. On the bottom of the sticks are a set of blue LEDs that serve to light up your motherboard's memory slots. These are pretty neat features, especially if you have a case with a window and are bent on showing off every cool aspect of your system.
Editor's Note: The bottom blue LED's look really impressive. They add a glow to your DIMM slots and look stylish through and through when the room lights are off!!