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The heat-spreader is designed to enhance heat dissipation allowing better tweaks and overclocks. With XMP tweaking is done for you already. However, with memory being expensive as it is these days, you can quickly earn a few bucks by looking how far your memory can go. In our case, we'll tweak this memory manually as well, towards 3100 MHz. As you can see, the Tactical Tracer DDR4 DIMMs are not low profile memory. The idea is that heat is moved away from the actual memory chips and this increases potential overclocking and stability.
Still, with this design, any cooler in close vicinity of the memory should install just fine. Thanks to that heat-spreader the memory is very sturdy and can be inserted into the DIMM slots with ease. The leading top is where the RGB strip is mounted. All powered and managed/controlled over the DIMM slots (SMBUS communication).
Ballistix may (correct me if I am wrong) be using a PCB with eight layers with a total of, say, two ounces of copper? So yes, I have seated this memory on a Z370 setup. Above, Z370 on an ASUS STRIX motherboard, that's pretty much what that looks like with four DIMMs. Once you power up the PC the DIMMs will look quite different:
Basically, in the BIOS you just flick the XMP 2.0 compatible profile, and you'll be up and running at advertised speeds. The memory itself is optimized for the Intel X299, Z270 and Z370 platform with corresponding Kaby Lake and Coffee Lake architecture series processors.
This memory is all about good looks so I decided to throw in these extra photos as the photo above says it all really. Completely configurable in RGB preferences and animations. We'll look at that in a separated chapter with the control software.