Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer RGB DDR4 2666Mhz Quad Channel Memory Review

MSI X299 Gaming Pro Carbon – X299 Chipset
Intel Core i9 7900x (3.0Ghz) Ten Core 10 x 1MB L2 Cache 13MB L3 Cache
Thermaltake Water 2.0 Extreme
1x nVidia GTX 980Ti
HP dvd1260i Multiformat 24x Writer
Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 1050 Watt PSU
Windows 10 Pro 64bit

Memory Tested
4x Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer XMP 2666Mhz (16-18-18-38)

Reference Tested
2x Crucial Ballistix Tactical Tracer XMP 2666Mhz (16-18-18-38) - Dual Channel

Sandra is a software collection of synthetic benchmarks that will give us a basic idea as to what a system is capable of. It should be noted that SiSoft numbers can change depending on what hardware is being tested.  These were recorded using Sandra Professional Version 24.50.2017.11

AIDA64 Extreme Edition is a streamlined diagnostic and benchmarking software package designed to assist with overclocking and general system tuning.  The package also contains modules to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives in addition to normal stuff like stress testing and troubleshooting. 

Unigine is a synthetic benchmark much like 3DMark Vantage, but supports the newest of DirectX 11 technologies. The benchmark comes with lots of heavy tessellation and soft shadows to work the more flexible shaders found on DirectX 11 graphic cards. This makes this benchmark ideal for seeing exactly what a best case scenario might look like for a DirectX 11 capable GPU.

Benchmark Settings
HWBot Benchmark
DirectX 11 Presets
DirectX 9 Presets

PCMark 10 is an overall system benchmark to measure and compare PC performance using real-world tasks and applications. Similar to 3DMark this new version tests the entire system as a whole using applications that reflect typical PC use in the home and at the office.  This approach ensures that PCMark measures the things that matter, highlighting performance differences that will be apparent to end users and consumers.

SYSmark 2014 SE is an application-based benchmark that reflects usage patterns of business users in the areas of office productivity, media creation, and data/financial analysis and features the latest and most popular applications from each of their respective fields.  This is a Second Edition release to the popular SYSmark 2014 that works better with Windows 10.    

When you are dealing with high performance memory modules there is very little that separates them in terms of overall performance.  The charts above reflect the performance difference between a quad channel and dual channel memory configuration on the Skylake-X 7900X.  The synthetic benchmark numbers reflect what you would expect, more channels, higher numbers.  The surprise comes when we look at some of the real-world benchmarks and video benchmark.

Overall the difference between quad channel and dual channel quite small when you consider real world applications and at 2666Mhz you not going to be taking home any gold cups.  PCMark 10 was a real surprise with the score actually going up when run in dual channel. 

Well, that isn't really a surprise there is a performance hit when running quad channel memory configurations which can slow down certain applications. [*Cough]Games[*/Cough] when compared side by side.