Anything I should know about Ballistix Tracer?

Make sure it works in your board first (but I'm sure your smart enough to check that) but besides that it should be cool. My friend has the exact ram and it worked fine in his motherboard. He hasn't tried to OC it but everything has been fine for him.
 
Nothing's 100% guaranteed to OC well, I know people who have gotten good OCs out of Crucial RAM and they swear by the stuff.
 
Crucial memory is geared more towards stability than overclocking.

If you are looking to overclock, might i direct your attention to these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820313074

Team group has been around for quite awhile and put out some of the best overclocking memory on the market. Not to mention, its rated at 1600mhz vs 1333mhz. It also has a stock voltage of only 1.5v, which leaves some headroom for overvolting.
 
Thanks! That does look good. How does that compare to the red and blue Ripjaws or Geil Black Dragon? They all seem like good deals right now, or at least to my untrained eye.

Also, it seems like 1333/Cas7 would be better than 1600/Cas9, if you disregard the voltage and head room...but I have a feeling that it doesn't quite work like that. Where exactly can I learn about this?

edit: What about the OCZ AMD Black Edition? I'm not looking into it since I'm not getting a BE processor, but since I'm here I thought I'd ask. I know OCZ has been having issues, but I don't know exactly which ones have problems.
 
Drenlin said:
Thanks! That does look good. How does that compare to the red and blue Ripjaws or Geil Black Dragon? They all seem like good deals right now, or at least to my untrained eye.

Also, it seems like 1333/Cas7 would be better than 1600/Cas9, if you disregard the voltage and head room...but I have a feeling that it doesn't quite work like that. Where exactly can I learn about this?

edit: What about the OCZ AMD Black Edition? I'm not looking into it since I'm not getting a BE processor, but since I'm here I thought I'd ask. I know OCZ has been having issues, but I don't know exactly which ones have problems.
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I would stay away from OCZ in general, its really budget memory and makes use of some pretty cheap IC's.

1333/cas7 may sound good, but you won't see much overclocking headroom from it. You could probably pretty easily tighten the timings on the teamgroup to cas 8 with a little more voltage.

The ripjaws and black dragon also make use of excellent IC's and you should see good clocks from them as well.

Something else to look at if you are going with 2gb would be a 2x1gb kit, dual channel really helps over single channel.
 
I have the Ballistix Tracer 1333. The only thing that I didn't like about it is that it was advertised with a cas of 7 but when I got it installed it ran with a cas of 9. Still a great performer. I got my overclock to 1600 and 6-6-6-15.
 
salvage-this said:
I have the Ballistix Tracer 1333. The only thing that I didn't like about it is that it was advertised with a cas of 7 but when I got it installed it ran with a cas of 9. Still a great performer. I got my overclock to 1600 and 6-6-6-15.
Click to expand...

That's common, the timings are set to safe values by SPD because the advertised ones generally require overvolting to be stable or even to boot.
 
Thanks Cromewell good to know. I was wondering why my ram specs were never what they were on the package. Oh well a quick trip to the bios fixed that for me, even though I could not tell the difference between 7 and 9.

@Drenlin- The lights on the ram are kinda fun to watch but get annoying if you get distracted by moving/bright things like I am. I eventually got used to them and they no longer take my attention away from what I am working on.
 
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I actually didn't pick it because of the lights, haha. At the time, it had the best specs of the available 2GB sticks. However:

I hate to derail my own thread, but I think I'm going to take Aastii's advice and wait for a little more in the way of funding. CPU and mobo in the sig. :D The initial idea was to get one 2GB stick initially, and the other one later on, followed by a HDD and GPU, but I think I'll be able to get them both now. Also have a higher budget.

So...I'm going to attempt to sink $115-$120 into the RAM. What would be the best choices? Like..top 5 or something?
 
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I would assume 1600 in that price range...seems to be the norm.

The blue 1.6V Ripjaws 1600 seems like a good bet to me, but so does some of the Black Dragon stuff. The 1.5-1.6V Mushkin Enhanced Blackline seems pretty good as well...they're a good brand, right?
 
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