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When Crucial rated this memory at PC4000, they meant it. The 250 MHz rating is dead-on accurate, as we were not able to push the RAM any further without causing errors in MemTest's Test #5, even at VDIMM +0.2V. The SPD table on the RAM indicates timings of 2.5-4-4-8 at 250 MHz, therefore we made use of those settings. Unfortunately, we also had to loosen the 1T timing to 2T as well, since 250 MHz at 1T caused massive amounts of errors in MemTest.

Here are the Sandra and RightMark scores for 250-2.5-4-4-8-2T:

Going to 250 MHz at looser timings boosted memory bandwidth scores in every test but Real Write, which actually dropped by 300 MB/s and 50 MB/s respectively. In past testing, we've generally seen fairly minor differences in CAS latency settings. It's important to remember that we had to loosen the timings of the Ballistix memory when going to 250 MHz (2.0-3-3-8-1T to 2.5-4-4-8-2T), so it is not possible at this point to make a specific statement as to which of those timings had the greatest impact. Based on previous experiences, however, we know that there is usually quite a difference between 1T and 2T timings on the Athlon 64 platform. We are quite comfortable in suggesting that when buying RAM for your Athlon 64 system, you should be looking at whether it is capable of running with a 1T timing at your target memory clock.

edit- We did loosen timings a bit more to 3-4-4-8 and upped the voltage to 2.9 but we were unable to run Memtest without any errors beyond 259 Mhz. It should be noted that with other memory reviews from other manufacturers that we also noticed very limited overclocking headroom above the stated memory rating.

Crucial's Ballistix PC4000 definitely lives up to the Crucial name - not once did we experience stability problems with the memory, performance was at the 6000 MB/sec barrier in Sandra at 250 MHz, and the activity LEDs sure were fun to watch during benchmarking. We wished that there was a bit more headroom as a 1T timing at 250Mhz would not work nor would clockspeeds above 250Mhz. This memory should be a wise purchase for those interested in comfortably raising your HT or FSB bus speed in order to overclock those multiplier-locked processors without having to resort to using a memory divider, and of course for getting some extra oomph from your computer's memory performance department. The activity LEDs also make you 10x more l337 at LAN parties than all your friends with regular RAM.