Computex 2016 - Day 3

Computex 2016 - Crucial

The biggest news to come from Crucial, our final meeting of Computex 2016, was that it was spinning off Ballistix into its own brand, much the same as Lexar – all three are owned by Micron. Ballistix is to be the gaming identity of Crucial, with a greater focus on high performance and aesthetics than Crucial memory or storage products.

On the storage front, Ballistix was finally able to show off an M.2 NVMe SSD, the Ballistix TX3. It's still early days, so specs and pricing aren't confirmed yet, but the company is looking to release the drive this year and also said that it will ship in capacities up to 1TB, with that one being double-sided. It also told us that it is looking to implement a small heatsink on the controller to aid with heat dissipation and hopefully eliminate or at least reduce performance bottlenecks that arise from throttling.


As for memory, Ballistix will offer three different lines – Sport as the entry-level of the brand, Tactical as the mid-range and Elite at the high-end. We saw a few different modules, with the Sport one being the only one to have different aesthetic options. Interestingly, we were told that since Ballistix is now a separate brand, the possibility of using ICs from manufacturers other than Micron (for example, to hit higher frequencies) is there.


Lastly, Crucial had the upcoming MX300 SSD on display, which is finally ready for a launch after review samples were initially recalled to address a firmware-related performance issue.