It is hard to come to a different conclusions about the DIMMs than Crucial. It really is a great option for mainstream users, and those that want to tweak a bit more performance out of them definitely can. For that purpose, they do very well, but really, that's about it. The fact that the overclocking gains I got on my Haswell testbench did not require any sort of voltage boost for stability was a nice, rather unexpected treat, but the Crucial Ballistix Sport XT is, other than that, a rather basic kit with decent specifications.

The Crucial Ballistix Sport XTs are a good option for those wanting a good base set of memory with specs a bit higher than the rather basic and utterly common 1600 MHz DIMMs, and the identical XMP and natural "JEDEC" timing profiles on these sticks will ensure that no matter what system you decide to run, you can buy this kit first because it will work well on the platform you decide to use. It's a great kit to have around for testing a system, has enough capacity to meet the needs of nearly any user, and is priced well too. The large heatsink means it'll work in some of the toughest thermal environments, but that heatsink and its color are, well, original in a way that doesn't appeal to me.

The Crucial Ballistix Sport XT provides an interesting choice with decent headroom (a rock-solid 233 MHz with my sample) for overclocking, but that headroom apparently does not increase with more voltage. That might be due to my test platform, but seems to also be a common facet of all Micron-IC built sticks. There at least was some headroom, up a couple of memory dividers, rather than none at all. I'm going to keep the Crucial Ballistix Sport XT kit around for some time, and it's one AMD users might want to pay more attention to--more so than Intel users.