Now lets look at the video encoding benchmarks that we are using.  First is the program XMpeg, which takes your DVD files and converts them into a more usable file type.  In our case we used DivX 5.20 as the CODEC for encoding.  So lets see the results for this program.

    First we see that the lowering in timings provides a 2% increase in performance, much like we've seen over the last few tests.  When overclocked the difference is slightly higher, at basically a 3% increase in rendering speed.  Overclocking the RAM does better than previous tests, with the performance boost being about 21% instead of the 13% we've seen before, as there is less of a penalty for increasing latency in this test.

    Lets know look at MPEG-2 encoding using TMPGEnc.  So how does the lower timings of the Crucial memory fair in this test?

    At the same FSB we see that there is no real difference in performance, less than 1%.  Overclocking the RAM we see that it becomes more efficient, by about 3.5%.  Overall TMPGEnc doesn't show much of an improvement by having RAM with better timings.  How about our last test, that of a 3D terrain rendering program, Terragen.

    Terragen is a rather new program to our tests, but is free for personal use and make very nice looking terrains.  The terrain I generated had a total of over 570000 quadrilaterals.  So lets see the results.

    We see that timings mean nothing to this program, as the different timings show absolutely no difference in performance.  Overclocking the RAM allows you to increase the performance almost equally per clock speed increase.  Otherwise there was very little difference between the two sticks of RAM tested in this test.

Conclusion

    We've taken a look at basically all aspects of the new Crucial Ballistix memory.  So what can we conclude about this memory?

    First is the packaging of the RAM.  Here Crucial has decided to follow the idea, simplicity rules.  While this works pretty well for the memory as it helps cut costs, I would have preferred that both of the sticks of memory be in the same package.  This would make it seem like the RAM was really designed as a dual channel product instead of two single channel sticks of memory.  The actual memory itself was solidly designed with copper colored ramsinks covering the RAM itself.

    Next is the overclocking of the RAM.  I found that the RAM would overclock to about the maximum that the board would do even with the updated BIOS, this was with either the Corsair or the Crucial memory in it.  As for the tightest timings I managed to get the timings you saw in the test results, which are the maximum supported by the motherboard.  I was also able to get 2-2-2-5 timings at up to 217MHz.

    As for the performance results we see that for the most part, the two sticks of RAM performed very close to each other even with the differences in timings.  The latency of the Crucial memory at its tightest timings was a good bit lower than the Corsair memory, and provided better synthetic numbers.  The real world differences between timings was less than 3% in basically all cases.  At slower speeds the difference in timings doesn't make as much of a difference as they are still very low, but compared to higher speed and looser timings the performance increase drops quite a bit.

    As for the price of the RAM, we can see that the price of each stick of memory and the 'twin' pack of the memory is about the same price as most other CAS2 based memory of comparable sizes.  So the price of the memory is really equal for most other comparable sticks of memory.

Good Points

• 2-2-2-5 timings
• Crucial memory
• Good Overclocker

Bad Points

• No major increase in performance on a PIV

Final Words

    This RAM is a good choice for the AMD based system overclocker, as with those processors latency is as important as bandwidth.  The plain packaging is the only problem with this RAM, though the price is on par with most other similar RAM types.

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