Overclocking and Temperatures

DDR4 memory has a JEDEC standard of 2133Mhz, that means that the lowest speed a stick of RAM can be is 2133Mhz. Almost all modern RAM sports an X.M.P profile which is programmed into the RAM itself and when activated overclocks the RAM past the JEDEC standards, for the Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4-2400 the X.M.P profile, as the name implies, is set at 2400Mhz. Now, setting an X.M.P profile is extremely easy but going past the X.M.P profile gets a little tricky, to really see what the Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4-2400 RAM is really made out of I decided to push it beyond its X.M.P profile settings and overclock it manually. After much trial and error I managed to get an overclock of 2933Mhz at 1.35V with timings at 16-16-16-39, this is very impressive for a quad channel RAM kit that is marketed at 2400Mhz, its a 22% increase!

Temperature at 100% load and 2933Mhz. Right side

Temperature at 100% load and 2933Mhz. Left Side

I was pleasantly surprised with the stable overclock of 2933Mhz I was able to achieve with the Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4-2400, my next concern was the temperature. Typically, high RAM temperature is never an issue and heat spreaders are mainly used for aesthetic purposes, nevertheless I wanted to see what temperatures the Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4-2400 kit reached when overclocked to 2933Mhz at 1.35V. As you can see, even with the low profile heat-sink the temperatures during a memory stability test were were no greater than the motherboard’s regular operating temperature.

Here we see the aforementioned JEDEC standards within the bios, this is also where all the magic happens when it comes to manual overclocking. The absolute limit for the Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR4-2400 Quad-Channel was 2933Mhz, bumping it up to just 3000Mhz caused my system to not boot and spit out error codes, no matter how much I tried playing with the timings and the voltage I simply could not get any higher. 2933Mhz is an amazing overclock considering one would be paying for 2400Mhz, in this next section we will be talking about the performance of this RAM at stock speeds and with an overclock and we will be comparing it with last year’s prime enthusiast rig, the 4960X with a quad channel DDR3 RAM.