Crucial announces super low-profile RAM kits

Crucial has announced a range of serious, performance RAM modules which barely stick their heads above the DIMM slots on your mobo. This is particularly useful in overclocked systems where that space is already in high demand: air coolers often impinge on the area around the CPU socket to the extent that the fans can interfere with the RAM slots on your motherboard.

If you're into getting the most out of your PC through overclocking the chances are you've got some enthusiast memory installed, and chances are that enthusiast RAM has an unnecessarily large heatsink sat on top of it to make it look, well, kind of cool and angry. Those heatsinks are supposedly there to keep the RAM modules cool, but modern memory rarely needs such cooling and these attachments have largely become indicators of enthusiast-class sticks rather than having any real function. This is the niche area where low profile memory kits come in, like Crucial's Ballistix Tactical LP and the Crucial Ballistix Sport VLP.

The sticks come in 1,600MHz flavours with capacities of up to 8GB per module. That means you can pick up packs of between 4GB and a chunky 32GB of speedy DDR3 RAM. These low profile kits also combine that diminutive size as well as a lower power requirement - both sets come in at 1.35v compared with the traditional 1.5v or 1.6v you get with standard enthusiast modules.

You can pick up the new memory modules now, and I've got a couple sets about to land in my test rig soon.

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.