Micron has killed off one of the most iconic memory brands in a surprise move that will see the Crucial Ballistix lines of memory fade into everyone else's, no longer competing for your gaming PC dollars. Although Crucial will continue to have memory kits of a more generic kind, the Ballistix gaming and overclocking-focused kits will be no more.
Crucial Ballistix memory has been around in one guise or another for two decades, with DDR1 Ballistix kits helping to overclock early Athlon and Pentium processors for big performance gains. Ballistix kits even competed for the DDR4 memory world record at a time, but since then the brand has made fewer and fewer strides, and nothing was released when DDR5 rolled around in 2021.
Reportedly, Micron memory chips have struggled to reach the kind of frequencies necessary for high-end DDR5, which may well be why it's killing off the Ballistix brand of Crucial RAM; though Micron memory chips will still be used in Crucial SSD prodicts like the X and P series.
"We remain focused on growing our NVMe and Portable SSD product categories, which both offer storage solutions for PC and console gamers," Micron said in a statement. "Additionally, 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."
It hinted that it may return to the enthusiast memory market in the future, but that for now at least, Micron and its gamer/overclocking brands are no more.