Crucial is a key brand in the Lexar media family of products. The 'Memory Experts™', a wholly owned subsidiary of Micron Technology, Inc., is currently the offering a comprehensive range of memory product lines.

The company recently announced a new series of DDR3 products, rated at 1800MHz. The Crucial Ballistix BL2KIT12864BE180 memory 2GB memory kit is in our labs and we will test it today under the Nvidia 790i SLI platform, which offers high flexibility and overclocking margins.

The Crucial Ballistix line is specifically built for performance enthusiasts who want to push the performance envelope without worrying about data loss or corruption, mysterious intermittent errors and display problems, or worse - the dreaded BSOD, the company claims. The Ballistix line of features advanced speed grades, low latencies, and integrated aluminum heat spreaders.

A Ballistix dual inline memory module (DIMM) consists of a number of memory components that are attached to a black printed circuit board. The gold pins on the bottom of the DIMM provide a connection between the module and a socket on a larger printed circuit board. The pins on the front and back of a DIMM are not connected to each other.

Ballistix 240-pin DIMMs are found in DDR3 memory. DDR3 boasts an improved architecture allowing very fast data transmission. The Ballistix 240-pin DIMMs are available in DDR3 PC3-14400 SDRAM (DDR3-1800).

- Main features

• Module Size: 2GB kit (1GBx2)
• Package: Ballistix 240-pin DIMM
• Feature: DDR3 PC3-14400
• Configuration: 128Meg x 64
• DIMM Type: UNBUFFERED
• Error Checking: NON-ECC
• Speed: DDR3-1800
• Voltage: 1.9V
• Memory Timings: 8-8-8-24

- Retail package

Crucial provided us a retail package of 2x1GB of Ballistix PC3-14400 series. The modules cost $206 and they can be obtained directly from Crucial. The kit we received arrived in a common carton box, with the memory modules packed into antistatic plastic bags.

CPU-Z provides information about the installed memory. The Crucial PC3-14400 supports Nvidia's EPP v2.0 profile that should give you instant performance boost when paired with an Nvidia 790i SLI chipset. The embedded JEDEC timings for 444,593 and 667MHz are rather relaxed, allowing us to seek for tightest timings for you later in this review:

For some reason, CPU-Z doesn't display the EPP 2.0 information.

More details are available through Everest Ultimate Edition: