Intel Skulltrail Preview @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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Intel Skulltrail Preview - What is it? Is like Cloverfield? Why is it here? Will it destroy the city? And what will it do for me? These are just some of the questions we seek answers to as we evaluate this enthusiast class behemoth packing two Core 2 Quads.

So can I honestly recommend the Skulltrail platform to anyone? Certainly, but only to those with fat wallets who demand the type of performance and multitasking that only an 8 core monster can deliver, and those folks are few. For the gamer I...
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PLEASE DIGG TO SHARE!
 
mmm generally dual cpu based boards are meant for servers...


but okay :D:D
 
Well SMP isn't just for servers but high end workstations as well. Typically they are used for video editing and 3D applications rather than gaming or general enthusiast type usage scenarios.
 
Uh, no quad channel testing, were you purposely trying to kill the memory bandwidth or does the board not support it?
 
ND40oz said:
Uh, no quad channel testing, were you purposely trying to kill the memory bandwidth or does the board not support it?
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Unless the specs have changed since it was originally announced, the board should support quad-channel memory.
 
ND40oz said:
Uh, no quad channel testing, were you purposely trying to kill the memory bandwidth or does the board not support it?
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The board does not support that feature as far as I know. The review kit Intel sent us only had two 2GB FB-DIMMs in it.
 
Weird. I didn't expect any games to be faster, seeing as most aren't even faster on a quad-core versus a dual-core, but why not run 3D rendering tests? 3D renderers are the only things apart from CPU benchmarks that can max out multiple cores so I hope you guys throw those in when you can do a full review.

Also, another important thing I keep wanting to mention: UT's Flyby's are terrible CPU tests. In all UT games, "flybys" just have a camera moving through an empty level with NO bots, AI, physics, explosions, etc. That's an awful way to test a CPU since you'll need actual bots running around killing stuff in order to use the CPU. You should really record a demo with as many players on each team as possible on a large map (Warfare) and then test that. (just like a Quake 3 timedemo) That's the only way for UT3 results to mean anything when testing the CPU...and flybys aren't anything like the actual gameplay anyway so the frame rates will always be much higher than what you'd normally get when playing.
 
Dan_D said:
The board does not support that feature.
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So Intel put out a board with the Seaburg chipset without quad channel, that doesn't make any sense. Why not just use the San Clemente chipset so you don't have to use FB-Dimms?

Oh, you ninja editor :)
 
ND40oz said:
So Intel put out a board with the Seaburg chipset without quad channel, that doesn't make any sense. Why not just use the San Clemente chipset so you don't have to use FB-Dimms?

Oh, you ninja editor :)
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Again I saw nothing in the documentation supplied to us by Intel about quad-channel memory features. Looking at the 5400 chipset data sheet the chipset supports the feature, but again it is unknown if the motherboard does it. If it did I would have expected Intel to send us 4 FB-DIMMs to test it which is something they didn't do.

As far as not using the San Clemente Chipset I can't comment on that. The truth is the Skulltrail is an oddball motherboard that doesn't make a lot of sense for a number of reasons. According to the information they gave us the Skulltrail platform and D5400XS motherboard in general are more targeted to the enthusiast and graphic workstation markets rather than the generalized server/workstation markets.
 
I wanna take back my commment about making UT3 demos to test the CPU with.

I just recorded a demo from UT3, played it back and the frame rate was around 24 regardless of the resolution, settings or whether or not it in windowed mode...and you can't spec from an FPS view apparently. You're just stuck in third-person or free-roam spectator mode. I didn't realize that's how UT3 demos work. Epic really needs to fix this.
 
NKDietrich said:
Can't click on the BIOS screens for readable screenshots. Fix! :)
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That has to do with the way the Intel BIOS font displays in the image capture. I tried a number of cards to out put the signal and a couple of different capture devices and I wasn't able to get them to be any clearer than that. I just tried the latest BIOS which was released today, BIOS version 821 and it wasn't any clearer. This BIOS just didn't display the same way as the AMI and Phoenix Award BIOS' do.

So unfortunatley I can't make them any clearer than they are at present.
 
They also were both overclocking demons. An additional 800MHz (4.0GHz) on nothing but air is very awesome.
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Uh, what? My P3 could do 200MHz over stock (500 -> 700) in 2000. My Xeon does 500MHz in its sleep. 800MHz is not 'demon' territory by any means.
 
Down8 said:
Uh, what? My P3 could do 200MHz over stock (500 -> 700) in 2000. My Xeon does 500MHz in its sleep. 800MHz is not 'demon' territory by any means.
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Actually I was only limited by the cooling I was used. They would POST at 4.4GHz and even make it into Windows, but the cooling wasn't adequate at that speed. So they ended up throttling back down to a 10x multiplier. With water cooling they would most likely go much farther. Also being able to get to 4.0GHz without a voltage change is pretty good in my opinion. You also have to look at this in the proper context. Overclocking dual processor machines isn't very easy. In fact most of the time you can't do it in hardware at all. The server chips don't do that. On the rare occasions where overclocking was possible SMP machines always did badly when it came to overclocking because one CPU will always overclock better than the other. So for an SMP rig I think these LGA 771 QX9775's are demons in their particular market.
 
Vorazan said:
I wanna have sex with that mother...... board ! :)
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It is a pretty sexy motherboard. I was dissappointed with FSB overclocking on it though. Hopefully the production BIOS (version 821) will be better than the 780 BIOS I used during testing.
 
mashie said:
That board is begging to have both SLI and Crossfire running at the same time. :p
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Actually, that would be rather difficult to do. You'd have to make sure that each card was a single slot solution. The third PCIe slot blocks the second one if dual slot cooling solutions on a video card are present. Also that power connector I mentioned is a pain in the ass to work around. Even with a single slot card you can't always make it fit right. I had to trim down a four pin molex connector to make that work.

According to Intel leaving that auxiliary power connector unplugged is unwise even when single GPUs are used.
 
cliche said:
Ah the Abit BP6 with dual celeries running at 100 Mhz FSB instead of 66 - halcyon days
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Indeed. I had a BP6 myself. I've also had a couple of dual Opteron setups and I had a dual Pentium II at one time. I even had a dual Xeon system at one point.

Actually I've been a SMP system user/owner for a number of years. I only stopped recently once the dual core CPUs came out. Other times I had single processor machines it was because I couldn't afford to go dual.

In fact my first dual processor motherboard and CPU combination is hanging on the wall in my computer room. It is a dual processor Pentium Pro 180MHz system on an Intel PR440FX Providence motherboard. The CPUs are overclocked to 200MHz and have been virtually every day of their lives. I used this system in one capacity or another for a number of years. I've got 64MB of RAM on it. I don't know what happened to the rest but I used to have three EDO DIMMs which is what that board uses.
 
Seems kinda neat. I think they should sell the boards with the cpu's only. And instead of crazily overpriced, just make them stupidly priced and get some out there just for bragging rights. This thing is just a stupid oddity but I would sure love to surf the net with 8 cores! Maybe encode a movie or two just to tell everyone how that I NEED that kind of power. But yea instead of a gazillion make it a bazillion dollars and put them in the hands of a lot of people. Maybe dual proc boards could become mainstream :eek:. I mean really an octo-core cpu isn't as cool sounding as as a 4x4. Man if I had the kind money that people who buy this have, I'd burn mine for fun.
 
This still freaking pisses me off. It should've been a 775 chipset motherboard.
 
Dan_D said:
Well SMP isn't just for servers but high end workstations as well. Typically they are used for video editing and 3D applications rather than gaming or general enthusiast type usage scenarios.
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Yes...

I'm not trying to be a douche bag here or maybe I am...

why didn't you like do a Maya benchmark or.... something?

All I see is a gaming benchmark. I want a Maya, or.... something non-game based mark. :(

Why? I've never really seen a dual cpu gaming machine, not much use. I suppose to host a game server and play at the same time? I guess that could be it...
 
I'm not trying to be a dick but why do we need a workstation if we are gamers? I guess i dont quite understand.The game benchies were damn kool but its a workstation right? Even if we could afford it why does a "gamer" need this? Another great review Kyle and Dan as always.....keep up the great work guys! (Guess i really am a noob.):eek::) I get alot of money around tax time and have a great job(railroad), so i could afford this. I'm jus kinda confused.
 
brhinton89 said:
I'm not trying to be a dick but why do we need a workstation if we are gamers?
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Only reason I can think of is for the day that games can effectively use 8 cores. Somehow I think a single-CPU octo-core processor costing less than $300 that will run on inexpensive motherboards with inexpensive memory will be available by that time though, given the history of dual and quad cores... ;)
 
what type of cpu heatsink mounting holes does it have? I would love to see some fah smp benchmarks with 4 smp clients running in vmware. that would be interesting to see.
 
tnu5 said:
Yes...

I'm not trying to be a douche bag here or maybe I am...

why didn't you like do a Maya benchmark or.... something?

All I see is a gaming benchmark. I want a Maya, or.... something non-game based mark. :(

Why? I've never really seen a dual cpu gaming machine, not much use. I suppose to host a game server and play at the same time? I guess that could be it...
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Actually that's the point. Intel markets this as the ultimate gaming and enthusiast platform. To be fair they do state that it is the ultimate platform for content creation but we wanted to show the readers what if anything Skulltrail could do for you. If you'll notice the [H] doesn't review server equipment or workstation motherboards. We approached this as an enthusiast product, and not a workstation product.

Remember, Quadro's aren't locked out of SLI on non-NVIDIA chipsets. However this board was specifically designed to offer consumer level SLI for gaming purposes. I think there are a lot of you thinking of this as a server or workstation part and as I stated in the article opening, it is not that type of product, yet it is built on that architecture.

brhinton89 said:
I'm not trying to be a dick but why do we need a workstation if we are gamers? I guess i dont quite understand.The game benchies were damn kool but its a workstation right? Even if we could afford it why does a "gamer" need this? Another great review Kyle and Dan as always.....keep up the great work guys! (Guess i really am a noob.):eek::) I get alot of money around tax time and have a great job(railroad), so i could afford this. I'm jus kinda confused.
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You don't. The article is pretty clear on that point. This is a gaming and enthusiast platform that is built on the Xeon and Seaburg chipset technology. Even if you are building an all out balls to the wall super-expensive rig, your money is better spent on 3-Way SLI and a 30" LCD which BTW you could get along side a QX9770 CPU and still come out cheaper than you would buying this thing.

chrisf6969 said:
So why only gaming benchmarks? ?

We need some real SMP benchmarks / apps.

encoding, professional 3d apps, etc..
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I think I was fairly clear on this. Again we didn't approach it as a workstation product. The [H] is about enthusiast class hardware which is primarily used for gaming. This product can do a little of everything but let me approach this another way.

Those of you who know what applications can take advantage of 8 cores, and need that type of performance for those applications already know how the Skulltrail would compare to our test system. You shouldn't need benchmarks to tell you which machine is going to beat the other in 3D Studio Max or Maya. That's pretty obvious. Reviewing the Skulltrail as a server or workstation platform would be useless without us comparing it to other 5400 chipset motherboards with conventional Xeons. We don't even have that hardware on hand at present. So we have nothing worth comparing the Skulltrail to in that regard.

zmjone2992 said:
what type of cpu heatsink mounting holes does it have? I would love to see some fah smp benchmarks with 4 smp clients running in vmware. that would be interesting to see.
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It uses standard LGA775 mounting holes. Our test system was using two Zalman CNPS9700AT heat sinks and fans. Again as for the non-gaming benchmarks, that information is cool, but we have nothing to compare it to. Comparing the Skulltrail to a gaming rig like the test system we used built around a QX9770 processor wouldn't be fair or make any sense. However since Skulltrail is a gaming platform it made total sense to compare it to another gaming platform.

farfromhome said:
Only reason I can think of is for the day that games can effectively use 8 cores. Somehow I think a single-CPU octo-core processor costing less than $300 that will run on inexpensive motherboards with inexpensive memory will be available by that time though, given the history of dual and quad cores... ;)
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Well Lost Planet actually does a good job of using both processors and you can actually set the thread count in the options menu. Unfortunately even though Lost Planet can leverage these processors that fact is offset when the game becomes GPU limited at higher resolutions.
 
Could you run folding at home (3 or 4 instances) on it and go play say crysis for me?


Iam not sure how many here fold 24/7 and play games on the same system. I have for 5 years now and cant see changing that anytime soon , and if this thing is what it appears to be I might have an upgrade in the future.
 
Does anyone if anyone other than intel will make a board based off this combo of seaburg and 2x nforce 100 (w/e that is) ?

So why can't trip SLi be done but 4x crossfire can be? I was going to say their isnt enough pciE lanes coming from the 2 nforce chips to make it happen (16x8x16), but doesn't quadfire need to borrow lanes from the nforce chips to make their solution work? Maybe im just not seeing it.
 
Simpson5774 said:
Does anyone if anyone other than intel will make a board based off this combo of seaburg and 2x nforce 100 (w/e that is) ?
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There is nothing preventing another company from using a 5400 chipset and nForce 100 or 200MCPs. I would not be surprised if ASUS made their own Skulltrail-esque board at some point.

Simpson5774 said:
So why can't trip SLi be done but 4x crossfire can be? I was going to say their isnt enough pciE lanes coming from the 2 nforce chips to make it happen (16x8x16), but doesn't quadfire need to borrow lanes from the nforce chips to make their solution work? Maybe im just not seeing it.
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According to NVIDIA the nForce 100 MCPs are incapable of 3-Way SLI. They have provided no details as to why that is. I think the MCP's providing extra PCIe lanes is transparent to the ATI driver. The ATI driver probably detects the Intel chipset and ok's the use of Crossfire. In any case there are enough lanes on the board to handle either 3-Way SLI or Crossfire-X in any configuration. Each slot is capable of a full x16 lanes of bandwidth.

I wish I had more information on this but NVIDIA only told us what I mentioned above. They claim that under no circumstances will Skulltrail ever be capable of 3-Way SLI.
 
Too much processing power for a gaming system, and if you wanted processing power you'd buy a real workstation board and some xeons XD

FBDIMMs... no no

2 CPUs have to share one memory controller...

I think this whole thing failed... too expensive for no performance boost, I'll stick with a OC'd Q9450, and some 9800GX2 or 9800GTX.

I guess if you want to win at 3dmark and spend too much money, you could invest in skull trail, but for the hardcore gamer that doesn't have money coming out of his ears.... option two listed is the way to go.

This whole thing is going to be scrapped when nehalem is coming Q4 2008/Q1 2009... People are going to be just as screwed over as people who bought the AMD 4x4 Quad FX system.
 
tnu5 said:
Yes...

I'm not trying to be a douche bag here or maybe I am...

why didn't you like do a Maya benchmark or.... something?

All I see is a gaming benchmark. I want a Maya, or.... something non-game based mark. :(

Why? I've never really seen a dual cpu gaming machine, not much use. I suppose to host a game server and play at the same time? I guess that could be it...
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There's really no reason to do a Maya or a 3d benchmark but I would've like to see one. But obviously an 8cores will double a 4cores to almost the exact 2x. Rendering is pretty much cpu driven.
 
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