Although less known nowadays, generic-looking Crucial modules ruled the enthusiast memory market from the late 1990s until the early 2000s. These innocuous green memory sticks not only often overclocked better than anything else on the market, but they were usually much cheaper than competing offerings that were pre-binned, had fancy black PCBs, and even fancier heatspreaders. One of the reasons for this streak of success is the fact that Crucial is basically the retail arm of Micron, one of the oldest and most respected semiconductor manufacturers around, and thus usually have first or even sole access to Micron ICs.

Crucial currently has an impressive twenty-eight DDR4 offerings, but unusually - and perhaps brilliantly - they are one of the few companies offering not only quad-channel but dual-channel DDR4 memory kits as well. While that might seem weird, it is an affordable way of buying into the LGA2011-3 platform without having to spend a ton of money of a full quad-channel kit. Yes, performance will obviously be degraded but not nearly as much as you might expect. We might have to test this out in the future, but for now our interest is still in the company's full-blown quad-channel memory kits.

The memory kit that we are reviewing today doesn't seem special at face value - other than the fact that it's large at 32GB and DDR4 based - but we will definitely find out whether it has some of that old school Crucial magic. The Crucial CT4K8G4DFD8213 is a quad-channel 32GB DDR4 memory kit that features four 8GB modules clocked at DDR4-2133 with 15-15-15-36 timings at a low 1.20V. This is essentially identical to the formal JEDEC DDR4 specifications. It might not be as exciting as the G.Skill DDR4-3000 model that we previously reviewed, but it promises to be highly compatible and it is the most affordable 32GB DDR4 memory kit on the market at around $420USD/$450CAD. Also, you do get a lifetime warranty, which is something that Crucial pioneered in the memory market.