Introduction

It might seems hard to believe, but it has been several months since consumer DDR4 products first appeared on the market. Yet for me, those products have been around for a fair bit longer than they have been in stores. The company to first have samples widely available for testing was none other than Micron. Crucial is Micron's consumer-focused division we all know and love, memories of Micron "D9" memory IC's and the ever-so-fast-yet-affordable Crucial M4 still floating around enthusiast forums the world over. In fact, I've been using Crucial M4 drives in my test systems for many years now, so they have definitely impressed themselves upon me. But today, we've got some DDR4 to look at, not an SSD.

With so many mixed opinions about DDR4 being bantered around, seeing things clearly has sometimes been hard. The introduction of DDR4 brought us a base speed of 2133 MHz to play with, but by and far DDR4 is mostly about power reductions and increased density, not a performance increase over the much older DDR3 technology. So it only makes sense that I make my first thorough look at DDR4 with DIMMs specified to run at 2133 MHz, and with sticks made by Crucial, the first company to widely offer samples for testing. However, there is that density side of things to look at as well, so I have a huge 32 GB kit on my desk to torture, and tortured it was. Let's take a look.

Specifications