Crucial Anniversary: The results

Hey Walter that's not right! :D

They are hand picked uber sticks and I don't believe they are the same as standard Ballistix PC2-5300? at least none of the standard ballistix sticks I have used run as good as the 10th Anniversary stuff.

I take it your blue-ubers bust? :(

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Big.Wayne said:
Hey Walter that's not right! :D

They are hand picked uber sticks and I don't believe they are the same as standard Ballistix PC2-5300? at least none of the standard ballistix sticks I have used run as good as the 10th Anniversary stuff.
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I think you're letting your imagination get the better of you there. I know for a fact that the last 250 or so sets that were sold in the UK were ordinary PC5300 because I have the worksheets from the repair centre to prove it. I complained to Crucial that they had sold them all to one UK retailer, and that retailer had then bumped the price by almost 20% - pure profiteering. Crucial then made up 'roughly' 250 sets from the spare heatspreaders they had saved for warranty repairs and ordinary PC5300 and I bought two sets of that, and one set from the retailer as I wanted 3 sets. When I published this, the retailer demanded that Crucial sell the absolute very, very last Anniversaries to them, as they thought they had agreed a worldwide exclusive. As a result, the retailer bought and sold all the worldwide stocks of spare blue heatspreaders (so no possibility of a warranty swap-out), but the last ones sold in the UK were definitely 'reworked' ordinary PC5300 that had the gold/yellow heatspreaders removed and blue ones fitted. That is all Crucial ever claimed they were, and it's all they will replace them with under warranty. The retailer, rather unwisely, claimed they would all run at PC8000 speeds though, and so that retailer has had to replace numerous sticks with PC8500 Ballistix. If you bought them from Crucial though, you only get PC5300 Ballistix back. The heatspreaders are actually worth more than the RAM is now.

Big.Wayne said:
I take it your blue-ubers bust? :(
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All three sets died inside 9 months. I got PC5300 from Crucial (although Trading Standards made them prove their claims, hence I got the reports about the reworked PC5300) and PC8500 from the UK retailer becasue they claimed they would run at PC8000+. Depending on when you bought your 'Blue Ubers' I think you might find you have East Kilbride rework stock rather than the US made originals, almost all of which were sold through the US Crucial website. The death-rate amongst Anniversaries is extremely high though - mainly because they were usually run at mentally fast speeds and big voltages.
 
WJA96 said:
Depending on when you bought your 'Blue Ubers' I think you might find you have East Kilbride rework stock rather than the US made originals, almost all of which were sold through the US Crucial website.
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I bought mine in December 2006 from a European eStore and they are indeed Blue-Ubers! :cool:

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I'm sorry to hear of your bad experiences, sounds like you really went into depth on this one but I still don't think you can write off the entire *Limited Edition* batch. Obviously I cherish my set in a fond sort of geeky way and have always treated them with respect. I am not a memory expert and I'm not even sure what PCB or IC is used but these sticks have always worked wonders for me, particularly using low 1.8vDimm voltages.

I think you have some bad luck there but I wish you could express your experiences without rubbishing my precious sticks. :o

If I may tap into the wealth of your knowledge can you tell me which memory can run at speed timing combos from 250MHz 2-2-2 up to 600MHz 5-5-5?

The sweet spot for me has been 450MHz 4-4-4-12 1.8vDimm, and I can't find any other memory to beat it? that's why they are my Blue-Ubers! :D
 
If you check this, and other threads I had two sets of my 'ordinary' Anniversary sticks running 1200MHz. So did Jokester, and at least one person who bought from the UK retailer was getting fabulous performance from their RAM. And if you look at anyone's CPUz reports - they don't say anything other than PC5300 Ballistix, because that's all they were. At the time Crucial were making these, they were yielding excellent RAM chips, and if you look on the 'Athens' list you will find they used two different kinds of RAM chips, but you can't find out which ones you have without taking the heat spreaders off.

I've got PC5300 Ballistix now that runs PC8500 speeds with 5-5-5-12 on. We were all mugged by marketing unfortunately.
 
Oh well!

Only revived thread to check if peeps still had their sets because I heard Walter mention in a few threads there were not many sets left.

I am open to the suggestion they are indeed very normal very average sticks with a nice blue heatspreader but at the same time I hope people are open to the suggestion that maybe a few of these kits were special? I don't mind testing them again to see how they stack up against regular kits?

I guess they are special by merit of the fact I still got them and they are still working great! :)

WJA96 said:
We were all mugged by marketing unfortunately.
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Just a teeny weeny bit of a pessimistic viewpoint there buddy! Hopefully some of my optimism may rub off on you in a ying yang kinda way.

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I don't think there was anything ordinary about the August-December 2006 production of Crucial D9GMH or D9GMK RAM chips whatsoever. Indeed- if you look at the various threads about both the ordinary PC5300 Ballistix and the Anniversary RAM you'll see some truly scary overclocking going on - I had 3-3-3-8, 1T at 400MHz and I've just spotted someone running 5-5-5-18 at 668MHz (that's faster than some DDR3 RAM these days) so I don't think it was ever 'ordinary' - but the hand-picked bit is pure marketing - it just didn't happen, and Strathclyde Trading Standards actually made Crucial prove it didn't happen, because if it had happened, Crucial would have had to replace everything with whatever standard the original material was speed-binned at. It was an urban myth.
 
Ok Walter, I will say no more. Stepping back from the situation a bit I feel like I've stumbled across a touchy subject and I can tell it's rubbing you up the wrong way, certainly sounds like you went to a huge amout of effort on this one so lets just put the whole sorry mess behind us.

It's one of those situations where it's easier for you to deal with the experience by marginalising an entire batch and therefore you didn't miss out on anything and conversely it's easier for me to believe I got some rare and great performing memory, regardless of the hand picked bit I believe Crucial didn't mug with off with something for their 10th Anniversary that wasn't *special*

If you proceed with enforcing your all-encompassing-global-vision of what actually happened on me I will just get unhappy! :(
 
I'm not trying to depress or upset anyone, and I'm not touchy about it except in a missionary zeal "The UK retailer LIED to us" kind of a way - your RAM runs at the speeds it does (and that's way beyond the ratings claimed, whatever RAM it is). But if you were asked to prove it was hand-picked, whatever batch you got, you can't because Crucial have absolutely 100% definitely (no room for error at all) said it's not hand-picked or speed-binned in any way. In the US it was actually sold at a discount to the ordinary PC5300 Ballistix RAM.

Now, it only actually matters if yours dies and you want a warranty replacement or you want to sell it (and you don't want either of those things, so it's not an issue;))

As to how many sets are still running? I have no idea, Crucial wouldn't tell me in September 2007 how many sets they had replaced, in total or as a proportion of the total production, so we'll probably never know, but I know of at least 6 forums users who still have them running.

Actually - one thing has depressed me - I spent £750 on three 2Gb sets of PC5300 RAM. That's scary depreciation for you. I could have bought an Extreme CPU and it would have held it's value better. Or a Citroen:D
 
both my sets died and i got pc5300 ballistic back from rma and they have been fine ever since,still id have preferred to get back what i had bought as they were going for a premium at the time
 
My PC2 5300 ballistix did 1200mhz 2.2v 5,5,4,14

I've never had such great clocking ram....however it would fail every 6-8 months so I gave up and switched to OCZ. So far running two USD sets of 2x1gb 8500 SLI sticks and they are doing great.
 
I have them still running.. for a long time, not a single problem :)

My two sticks can do:

889 MHZ with 4-4-4-10-1T and 1:1 on my E8500 1778MHZ or @4.0GHZ. (2.250V)

With 5-4-4-12-2T they go even higher.

PRIME stable....any good ????

Processor Intel Core 2 DUO E8500 @ 4.0 - EVGA nForce 680i (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 - Crucial 2GB (2x1GB) DDR2 PC2-5300C3 667MHz Tenth Anniversary Dual Channel Kit (4-4-4-12-1T) - Asus TOP 260GTX - Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer - Seagate 200 GB, Seagate 80GB ViewSonic VX912 - Enermax 600 Watt - Windows XP Home Edition.
New, two 1700.11 SEAGATES HD's both 320GB..one for XP Home, second only race-sims.


Hansje ;)
 
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