Crucial Ballistix MOD: Temperature-sensing DDR3

Impressions of the MOD software

The MOD software itself is still in beta, which sort of explains the, uh, considerable space it takes on the screen. The enlarged pictures embedded below are 1:1 screenshots so you can see for yourself.

On the plus side, making MOD so large does make it very obvious and simple to use and all the buttons work. It's not hugely complex; while MOD reads the SPD and XMP data from the Crucial module, it doesn't even show the timings the system is actually running the memory at in real-time.


During our Computex meeting, Crucial was keen to point out to us that it understands most enthusiasts probably don't want yet another piece of software running in the background, especially since there are already perfectly capable alternatives from either motherboard vendors or third parties such as Speedfan or CPU-Z. Crucial admitted that right now the MOD software is more proof of concept and is currently in the user-feedback phase and it's also trying to work with other software teams.

As the way the temperature sensor works is available to anyone as part of an open JEDEC specification, access to its data can be easily and freely included in other software - there's no royalty collected by Crucial - making an industry push to include it in software and even by other memory companies arguably very worthwhile.


Crucial states there will be a variety of kits featuring the sensor soon available for P55/H55 and X58 platforms, "[and] is compatible with most of the enthusiast chipsets" as well. Surprisingly, no mention is made of AMD at all, although generally if kits work in Intel systems they'll also work in AMD AM3.