Test System

Initial Setup

I couldn't wait to get these sticks fired up in my ASRock X299 OC Formula. I was pleasantly surprised to find the sticks having a blue glow when installed. The DIMMs are just the right thickness and match the width of a standard DDR4 DIMM slot easily, and thanks to that bar up top, the light from the LEDs barely breaches that space as it is nicely diffused by the upper plastic strip.


The ASRock X299 OC Formula motherboard only has four memory slots; two on each side of the CPU socket. This is a purpose-built board made for overclocking DDR4 memory to the limits with Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X CPUs. I really like how the default blue glow matches this board and platform so well; you'll find the same blue hidden within the board's BIOS pages. That's quite interesting to me because I didn't tell Ballistix which board I'd be using for testing these DIMMs. It is like the sticks just knew what board they were in and adjusted themselves accordingly. This idea seems further bolstered by the fact that these sticks appear to go through a sort of boot-up sequence whenever the system is cold-booted, like they are checking themselves out and where they are located—it's like a little "Hello!" from the sticks as you hit the power button.


With the stick all lit up, the Ballistix logo up top really stands out. Several brands do this, and I like that you can easily see what memory you've got installed with just a quick glance—even when the LEDs are doing their thing.