Ballistix DDR2 reliability

I had great, fantastic plans to completely rebuild my main box this coming year, but that's not going to happen. However, I'd like to drag the life out a little longer by moving from 2GB of PC2-6400 to 4GB.

I run an Asus P5B Premium with a Pentium E2160 (OC'd to 2.93GHz) and 2GB of OCZ PC2-6400 DDR2. It works fine, but I'd like to move to a 4GB set.

I know the P965 chipset can run up to 8GB, but I don't want to invest that much into DDR2. If I can run both my current set and the new sticks, great, but I'm not going to lose my mind if it doesn't work.

I had a set of DDR1 Ballistix when I had my DFI NF4, but I had to send them in for replacement many times. I am willing to give the line up another shot, but I'm a little leery between my experiences and others with various Ballistix kits. A lifetime warranty is fantastic, but I don't want to keep sending in my RAM, so what I need to know is if Crucial has fixed whatever issues caused them to fail?

I had 3 sets of crucial ballistix not play well with both p965 boards and p35 boards. Then sold a set to a friend with a p45 board and he had to RMA them.

People avoided these like the plague. Especially but not limited to the tracers.

I have 4x1GB Ballistix (DDR2) based on the Micron D9 chips still rockin 4-4-4-12 @ 1GHz. I did remove the heatblankets, commonly referred to as heatspreaders and placed two Panaflo low speed 80mm fans tied together over them which I like to think helped in their longevity. The average VDimm put through them is 2.1v but they ran for a while at 2.2v. There's no way around mobo compatibility though. If it does appear that it could be a problem, manual timings are easy to set.

I also had to send my Ballistix Tracers in multiple times (4?) including D9s and then the crappier single-sided ones they sent in exchange. I finally gave up and put them in my girlfriend's PC (who mainly only does web browsing and Office) with a nice big fan blowing on them. They've been working fine for 4 years that way, kind of a waste of money though. I don't think I would ever buy Crucial memory again.

Thanks. They seemed to come up rather cheap, but I'll just pay a little extra for Corsair when the time comes.

I paid a stupid price of around $150 years ago for 2 gigs of ballistix 1066 which failed only a few months later. I had them replaced and sold them.
In the meantime I bought Mushkin blackline and have not looked back.
I now have 3 computers with Mushkin all running solid.

What I figure is if the RAM doesn't fail within the first year, it's pretty much good for the next 5+ years.

I had to RMA a stick of those Tracers once, I was running 4 of them. Then my memory went bad again. Didn't bother with it again, just haven't used Crucial since. I've stuck to Corsair and now Samsung, thanks to ASUS' early FW that wouldn't let the Corsair RAM I initially bought pass testing.

I had nothing but bad luck with Crucial DDR2. Had to RMA and had another set that I just threw away.

I had good luck with Crucial DDR1 Ballistix, not so much luck with the DDR2-800. The original version ran at 2.2v, and I had a number of them die in a few months. I RMA'd, and upgraded to the 2x2GB version, that ran at 2.0v, those died...but not outright. Instead if was painfully, BSoD every few weeks, passes memtest86+. Eventually I had to RMA all of it, went to Corsair 4-4-4-12 2.1v, and stuck with that....and sold the Ballistix.

I cannot comment on the DDR3 versions, no experience with them at all. Still on the 775 platform

I had multiple sticks of DDR2 Ballistix ("regular" and "Tracer") fail. I think their DDR3 is fine and have 2 sticks of that, but after multiple failures (fairly early on into DDR2, though not like THE FIRST DDR2 sticks or anything), I boycotted them for most of DDR2's life.

I ended up buying some Wintec AMPX modules. The user reviews seemed very positive. Seems to work fine, though I'm going to pop in my OCZ sticks and see if they'll play nice with the new stuff.

I really wanted to like the Ballistix line with the lifetime warranty, but something is wrong when you have to RMA them every so often. It's irritating.