Crucial Ballistix DDR3 Final Thoughts

Crucial is taking an interesting step for enthusiasts with their BL2KIT25664FN1608 kit. After this kit, upcoming products could all have the thermal sensor and that makes you feel satisfied since you'll have the possibility to monitor your RAM temperatures in a window on your screen, practically the same way you do with the rest of the HW sensors. Then, the real question is: Do you really need to monitor your RAM temperatures? Why is it that necessary?

In order to answer that question I think first we should think about system stability. If RAM overheating caused system instability there wouldn't be other way than lowering voltage or adding a fan over the RAM. Lowering voltage could also cause instability and that would become to an endless cycle. I can imagine that kind of situations in small cases with reduced airflow, like the mITX based ones, but in mid-tower or bigger cases it would be really difficult to suffer RAM overheating. Most probably you will have heat problems in your CPU or GPU than in your RAM. That's why RAM thermal monitoring isn't as important at the moment.

The second profile I could imagine to love this new extra would be Overclockers. While overclocking, voltage and temperature are key values to achieve the maximum frequency. Since we can manipulate and monitor voltage within the BIOS, the only factor remaining would be temperature. Anyway, it's most likely you won't over-voltage your memory without a good CPU-Heatsink, and nowadays many heat sinks cool the whole socket area and not only the CPU. More important, overclockers won't add voltage if the integrated circuits in the memory manufacturing don't support it and less if the kit won't overclock well even with higher voltages and lower temperatures.

This kit proved not to be interesting for overclocking, so thermal sensor isn't really necessary, but before I close my final thoughts with this sentence please remember this is their first thermal-sensor equipped kit. That means this product will work more like a pilot than a released product, and the MOD Utility is still in BETA phase. In some months, we could see some interesting and very overclockable Crucial kits with integrated thermal sensors and there is where the fun will be.

Let´s summarize all the results and head to the conclusions of this article.

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