This kit, to me, is the ultimate in RGB memory designs right now. To put it very plainly, some time ago we released an article giving awards to the top products we saw released throughout 2017, and we mentioned what we would like to see happen this year, in 2018. I had specific things I was looking for from memory manufacturers, and here we are just a few months into the year and my requests have quite solidly been met. That makes it quite easy for me to give these Tactical Tracer DDR4 DIMMs from Ballistix an easy 9.9 out of 10 with no questions asked. Not only does this design do everything an RGB memory kit should do, it does even more by offering the ability to easily customize the look if you have access to a 3D printer, which anybody does these days (if you are willing to pay for the printing as a service).

As many might have expected from a set of Ballistix Tracer DIMMs, what's on offer here isn't just the same as with past designs with a slightly new look to them; what we have here is a complete revolution in design that is a worthy successor to those old Tracer designs of the past many of us still have in our collections and will never let go. If this is an indicator of what we can look forward to from Ballistix, other memory brands are really going to have to step up their game now.

So we want to talk a bit about the overclocking too, right? As a 2666 MHz set, hitting 3200 MHz with default primary timings and a voltage boost to "normal" levels of 1.35 V is more than decent. I do have the single-sided version of these sticks and not the dual-sided one, so that kit's potential may be completely different, but given the history as to what actual memory ICs might be under the cover of these sticks with what Ballistix is likely to have access to, we can say that these are decent enough chips here, but not the ultra-pricey Samsung B-Die chips that can clock to the moon and back. It would have been nice to have both a 2666 MHz kit and a 3000 MHz one in my hands to compare both sets and see if they are the same or different in their overall clocking potential. I do have to say that I spent most of my time testing on Intel-based platforms, but I now got this kit in my AMD Threadripper system. I tested Z370, H370, Z270, and X299 and had fun with all of them, as is to be expected. However, I did have these sticks in boards from various different brands and installed the software in all of them and was glad to see it work, and those times where it didn't, there was integration with the motherboard's LED control software that let you control the RAM along with all the other parts of your system.

There are some things that aren't 100 percent perfect with these sticks depending on how you look at them, but for me, all of those issues aren't the fault of the sticks themselves; it's either a platform limitation or something similar getting in the way. We could ask for bigger overclocking or higher default clocks, but given how constrained the memory market seems right now, what these sticks I've got here are capable of is more than adequate. In fact, it's pretty much perfect.