Pour one out for Crucial Ballistix memory — Micron’s killing off the brand

theverge.com:

Years ago, one of my PC building buddies swore by Crucial Ballistix memory. I’m pretty sure I bought Corsair Dominator instead. Are people like me why Micron just decided to retire the Ballistix brand for good? Your guess is as good as mine because Crucial ain’t talking, but it’s definitely a thing that just happened. Crucial Ballistix is officially end-of-life, rep Chelsea Garecht confirmed to The Verge, and the company will focus on Micron DDR5 memory and Crucial-brand memory and SSDs instead.

It’s making me all nostalgic for the days when RAM brands seemed to matter.

There was a time you could theoretically buy worse RAM, or at least RAM from a notably less reputable manufacturer, for your desktop or laptop PC. I remember stories about defective batches of RAM and times when gamers eyed upstarts like OCZ and G.Skill with serious skepticism. I had a couple bad modules myself.

But consumer DRAM memory modules have been pretty reliable for many years now, and it’s only with recent generations of CPU that RAM speed is beginning to matter again (and even then, not by all that much in games). For quite a while, you’ve been able to buy the cheapest RAM that’ll fit your motherboard in whatever capacity you need and know that it’ll have quality chips from one of the few big DRAM manufacturers and very little lost performance (as long as your motherboard is set correctly), even if I admittedly did buy the “correct” 3200MHz memory for my own AMD Zen 3 chip.

Crucial comes from one of those big three DRAM manufacturers, by the way: Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron make up roughly 94 percent of that industry, and the Corsair modules I’m currently using have Micron chips in them. Micron created the Crucial brand back in 1996.

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