What just happened? Crucial Ballistix memory has been a name familiar among PC enthusiasts for many years, which makes it all the sadder to learn that Micron has just announced its Ballistix, Ballistix Max, and Ballistix Max RGB brands are being discontinued.

Micron never revealed why it was killing off the Crucial Ballistix name. The company said in a press release that it “will intensify its focus on the development of Micron’s DDR5 client and server product roadmap, along with the expansion of the Crucial memory and storage product portfolio.”

The news does explain why we haven’t seen any Ballistix DDR5 memory. Crucial does offer standard DDR5-4800, as opposed to any high-end Ballistix options with all the associated bells and whistles, such as heat spreaders.

“Crucial JEDEC standard DDR5 memory provides mainstream gamers with DDR5-enabled computers with better high-speed performance, data transfers and bandwidth than previously available with Crucial Ballistix memory,” said Teresa Kelley, Vice President and General Manager, Micron Commercial Products Group

PC Gamer speculates that the move could be related to Crucial memory only containing Micron memory IC, which aren’t known to clock as high as some of its competitors, such as SK-Hynix or Samsung DDR5 ICs. That would make it impossible to create Ballistix memory that reaches the DDR5-6000 speeds found in rival enthusiast-level kits.

Other Crucial products, such as its very popular standard and portable SSD drives and non-Ballistix memory, will continue to be supported by Micron.

It’s always a sad day when a familiar, long-lived brand is killed off. Those of a certain age may nostalgically remember using Crucial Ballistix memory all the way back to the DDR era, and it was only two years ago when an overclocker set the DDR4 frequency record by pushing some Crucial Ballistix Max DDR4-4000 memory to 7,004MHz. It beat the previous record that had also been obtained using Crucial Ballistix Max memory.




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