Although prices for X58 motherboards are still quite high DDR3 prices have come down over time and are now very acceptable. Today we'll be looking at one of the cheaper DDR3 memory sticks on the market from Crucial but as you'll see that doesn't necessarily means it performs poorly. This is 6GB of Crucial CT25664BA1339 DDR3.

As you can see this is the absolute minimum you can get with RAM with only the green PCB and RAM onboard and that's it. No heatsinks no frills just the absolute minimum. Of course this is also only  $29 for a 2GB stick or less than $90 for 6GB of RAM.

There isn't a ton of technical information the sticks so let's lay it out here.

DDR3 PC3-10600, CL=9, Unbuffered, NON-ECC, DDR3-1333, 1.5V, 256Meg x 64

This is all Crucial had.

We didn't have other DDR3 RAM to compare to currently so we tested it out on it's own in Sandra's memory tests.

Our test system.

This should be a little higher than DDR2 speeds. What we were more so interested in was how well it would overclock.

We had an amazing overclock at stock voltages which allowed us to take the RAM all the way up to 1.8GHz and a 3.9GHz clockspeed for the Core i7 920, from 2.6GHz!

Ten years ago when Crucial was founded, the Pentium 200 debuted, 33.6 modems were high end and 32 MB of ram would set you back $320. Today we have roughly 20 times the processing power, 100 times the bandwidth and 64 times the memory. While many computer component manufacturers have come and gone in that time frame, Crucial has managed to stand the test of time and have decided to celebrate their milestone with what else...commemorative memory.