14 DAY TRIAL // There comes a time in every products life cycle when manufacturers have to start adding new features in order to differentiate themselves from the competition, the DRAM industry being in this situation for quite some time now, Crucial just announcing they have added thermal sensors to their Ballistix line of memory.
For those of you that aren't up to date with Crucial's memory models, the Ballistix is their ultimate performance memory line, being made up from some of the fastest DDR3 memory kits available right now.
Available in bot dual channel and tri-channel kits, the Ballistix line ranges in size from 2GB to 6GB, the operating frequencies being set between DDR3-1600MHz and DDR3-2133MHz.
As far as timings are concerned, going for a kit rated at a higher speed means that you would have to give up on latency, the 2133MHz kit running with 9-10-9-24 timings while the 1600MHz memory modules runs at tighter 8-8-8-24 timings.
Although these sound pretty much like every other high performance memory kit available out there, Crucial has added quite an interesting addition to its Ballistix memory line as these new modules come with an integrated I2C temperature sensor.
Invented by Philips, the I2C computer bus is used to attach low-speed peripherals to a motherboard, thermal monitoring being one of its main uses inside a computer system.
Apart from the integrated temperature sensor, Ballistix modules also come with an aluminum heatspreader that is used in order to drive the heat away from the memory chips.
Furthermore, these new memory kits are compatible with Crucial's recently announced Ballistix Active Cooling Fan.
As far as prices are concerned, the Ballistix DDR3 memory line ranges from US $130.99 for the PC3-12800 4GB kit to US $196.99 for the 6GB tri-channel kit that is rated at PC3-12800 and offers 8-8-8-24 timings. (via TweakTown)