Introduction

We just recently took a look at what was offered by Corsair to not only monitor temperatures, but the lighting effect reminded me of fond memories of using DDR and DDR2 Crucial Ballistix Tracer memory. Back in those days Crucial had some really great overhead in their ICs and tended to scale really well when overclocking them. Fact of the matter is that the D9 ICs could take a ton of voltage, but with that voltage comes the onset of serious heat levels that the heat spreaders weren't capable of eradicating on their own. In those days there were only a couple of reliable models of memory specific coolers, or it took you grabbing a spare fan and somehow hanging it to blow over the memory to try to help combat the heat. Today is a different time and place, and advances have been made.

What you are about to see is another three piece assembly of technology to cool, monitor, and see the temperature of the ICs in use. Funny thing is that with the guys we would expect to see blazing LED activity, this time Crucial took a different approach. While the fan will work with almost any memory, and do the same job of cooling the memory, with the right set of memory and a quick download of a new application you can now monitor this memory via Windows. I know it isn't the same as a quick glance at LEDs, but this setup does offer a log function to view the results after a gaming session or benchmark, something the Corsair setup didn't offer.

Today we are going to be looking at the Crucial Ballistic Active Cooling fan (or BLACTIVE), paired with a 4GB kit of memory with an I2C chip to monitor temperatures; in conjunction with the application you can download to monitor said temperatures to complete the trio. If Crucial is still what it was today, I plan to do a bit of overclocking to push the memory and see what the system can do with XMP settings as well as with a healthy overclock. Let's take a bit of time to go over the specifications and get right down to the images and testing.