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We have been talking about Skulltrail for more than a year and today the platform finally launched. It delivers on Intel's promise to be an innovation showcase that caters to the "ultimate enthusiast". It is about as extreme as consumer hardware can get these days.
The foundation of Skulltrail is Intel's first dual-socket consumer eATX board D5400XS, which is based on technology Intel has used for Xeon boards. The D5400XS uses the 5400 chipset and provides support for FSB1600, up to 8 GB FB DDR2 memory as well as two LGA771 45 nm Core 2 Extreme processors or two 45 nm/65 nm Xeon CPUs. Other features include ten USB 2.0 ports, six SATA II ports, as well as two Firewire interfaces.
Since it is a game platform, Intel recommends using two quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors. The CPUs are clocked at 3.2 GHz, come with 12 MB L2 cache and a bunsen-burner thermal design power of 150 watts each. Intel claims that Skulltrail has reached a 3DMark06 score of 6481 and 20,160 points on Cinebench 10 when running at the standard 3.20 GHz frequency.
Obviously, price shouldn't be an object for anyone considering a Skulltrail system. The D5400XS board is priced at $650, while the QX9775 CPU carries a price tag of $1500 (each). Falcon Northwest was among the first to be offering a Skulltrail system to its customers with a starting price of $10,034.57. The package includes a 1000 watt power supply, 4 GB of memory, two GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics cards, two 1 TB hard drives as well as a DVD burner and Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit). A fully configured Skulltrail system tops out at just under $17,000.
The foundation of Skulltrail is Intel's first dual-socket consumer eATX board D5400XS, which is based on technology Intel has used for Xeon boards. The D5400XS uses the 5400 chipset and provides support for FSB1600, up to 8 GB FB DDR2 memory as well as two LGA771 45 nm Core 2 Extreme processors or two 45 nm/65 nm Xeon CPUs. Other features include ten USB 2.0 ports, six SATA II ports, as well as two Firewire interfaces.
Since it is a game platform, Intel recommends using two quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors. The CPUs are clocked at 3.2 GHz, come with 12 MB L2 cache and a bunsen-burner thermal design power of 150 watts each. Intel claims that Skulltrail has reached a 3DMark06 score of 6481 and 20,160 points on Cinebench 10 when running at the standard 3.20 GHz frequency.
Obviously, price shouldn't be an object for anyone considering a Skulltrail system. The D5400XS board is priced at $650, while the QX9775 CPU carries a price tag of $1500 (each). Falcon Northwest was among the first to be offering a Skulltrail system to its customers with a starting price of $10,034.57. The package includes a 1000 watt power supply, 4 GB of memory, two GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics cards, two 1 TB hard drives as well as a DVD burner and Windows Vista Ultimate (64-bit). A fully configured Skulltrail system tops out at just under $17,000.
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After reading reviews on toms hardware, personally i wouldn't buy this board for its price. Here is a quote off toms hardware:
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The Skulltrail system is unable to keep up with current desktop systems with a single quad-core processor by a long shot. We are not considering workstation applications here, since such applications are simply not the focus of the platform at this time. The main performance problems can be attributed to how Intel chose to use a chipset from the workstation segment, from the use of FB-DIMM memory and from the lack of widely multi-threaded software. Most applications can take advantage of four processors at most, meaning that the second quad-core CPU is practically never in use.
Also, the quality of the board is - simply put - very bad. Due to a lack of crucial options, the BIOS is not suited for overclocking, the Southbridge fan is far too loud, the PWM fan-speed regulation for the CPU cooler does not work and the board takes far too long to boot. Several times, the board even crashed when restarting.
It is incomprehensible why Intel would send a platform plagued with so many problems out to the press in such a rush. Currently, Intel is not under any kind of pressure from the competition - it has already proved that it makes the fastest CPUs in the market. So why create such a dubious platform? Considering the performance that can actually be harnessed by today's software, the platform's energy consumption is far too high. While Skulltrail theoretically offers the option of using SLI or CrossFire configurations, any single-socket system offers higher gaming performance at a much lower price.
The performance weaknesses of the Skulltrail motherboard's workstation chipset are its downfall. With games, the system falls behind the two single-CPU desktop systems by up to 45%.
In the benchmark suite, the two Core 2 Extreme QX9775 CPUs are even slower than a single QX9770. Although the Skulltrail dual-CPU system shows very strong performance gains in 3D rendering and video encoding tasks, its overall performance score is still hobbled by its gaming weakness.
Also, the quality of the board is - simply put - very bad. Due to a lack of crucial options, the BIOS is not suited for overclocking, the Southbridge fan is far too loud, the PWM fan-speed regulation for the CPU cooler does not work and the board takes far too long to boot. Several times, the board even crashed when restarting.
It is incomprehensible why Intel would send a platform plagued with so many problems out to the press in such a rush. Currently, Intel is not under any kind of pressure from the competition - it has already proved that it makes the fastest CPUs in the market. So why create such a dubious platform? Considering the performance that can actually be harnessed by today's software, the platform's energy consumption is far too high. While Skulltrail theoretically offers the option of using SLI or CrossFire configurations, any single-socket system offers higher gaming performance at a much lower price.
The performance weaknesses of the Skulltrail motherboard's workstation chipset are its downfall. With games, the system falls behind the two single-CPU desktop systems by up to 45%.
In the benchmark suite, the two Core 2 Extreme QX9775 CPUs are even slower than a single QX9770. Although the Skulltrail dual-CPU system shows very strong performance gains in 3D rendering and video encoding tasks, its overall performance score is still hobbled by its gaming weakness.
Source