zmjone2992
[H]ard|Gawd
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wow, didn't you know you could do sli with the quadro cards. Learn something new every day
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Intel Skulltrail Preview @ [H]
- Thread starter FrgMstr
- Start date
The choice was made by the chipset that Intel used on this motherboard.
They took a server chipset and gave it OCing abilities. If this thing shows some decent sales then it could be possible for the next edition to have DDR2, DDR3 or even DDR4, hell, you can buy boards now that support DDR2 and DDR3 so even that wouldn't be out of the question.
I am personally looking at this like the BadAx 1 & 2 ... the first one was pretty good, but the BA2 is just SWEET.
So let's all hope for a rather quick redevelopment cycle like the BadAxes had and then we could get our cake and eat it too!
wow, didn't you know you could do sli with the quadro cards. Learn something new every day
The quadro's had SLi first!
Then it got passed down to the consumer market.
No, I have PC2-5300 FB-Dimms and my score is 5.9, something is wrong with your setup.
Yes, the Skulltrail kit we received had 800MHz FB-DIMMs.
The quadro's had SLi first!
Then it got passed down to the consumer market.
No they didn't. The Quadro's with SLI came out after the Geforce 6-series was released to market. However the first SLI demo systems were demonstrated in Xeon test machines on motherboards with Intel chipsets that had two PCIe x16 slots.
I'll assume that your mentioning of '4gb' in this post actually refers to '4 modules' because the test configuration did in fact have 4GB of RAM installed.
Kyle already replied to this but you arrived late to the thread. Intel only provided two FB-DIMM modules and Kyle didn't think it was worthwhile acquiring two more of his own for a 4 module test rig. Why would he need to? As Dan mentioned already, 4 modules would not make any difference in games and they are much more difficult to setup. Moreover, the modules would likely never see another testing again. It is completely pointless from [H]'s perspective and I totally agree having Xeon systems myself.
Nenu
[H]ardened
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For Gamers?
This would be the biggest waste of cash I could make on my PC.
As a Gaming Enthusiast, nothing I have read about Skulltrail makes me want one.
It has very bad performance / $ and very bad performance / watt, both of which are high on my list of essentials.
It doesnt even offer an increase in performance in any game I play and even loses performance in some!
Incredible given its target market and the cost.
By the time 8 cores will be needed in Games, this will be old tech and superseded by much cheaper and faster hardware.
Anything more than 2 card SLI or Crossfire is of very little benefit so Quad cards are pointless for gaming.
By the time Quad SLI is giving near the performance return we would hope for, there will be newer, cheaper and faster hardware supporting it.
For Encoding, Compression, Rendering etc, I can see its appeal if its your livelihood and time costs money.
As an enthusiast, I would look on this in a few years as a lemon and regret spending so much for so little benefit
As a Gamer, <scratches head>
This would be the biggest waste of cash I could make on my PC.
As a Gaming Enthusiast, nothing I have read about Skulltrail makes me want one.
It has very bad performance / $ and very bad performance / watt, both of which are high on my list of essentials.
It doesnt even offer an increase in performance in any game I play and even loses performance in some!
Incredible given its target market and the cost.
By the time 8 cores will be needed in Games, this will be old tech and superseded by much cheaper and faster hardware.
Anything more than 2 card SLI or Crossfire is of very little benefit so Quad cards are pointless for gaming.
By the time Quad SLI is giving near the performance return we would hope for, there will be newer, cheaper and faster hardware supporting it.
For Encoding, Compression, Rendering etc, I can see its appeal if its your livelihood and time costs money.
As an enthusiast, I would look on this in a few years as a lemon and regret spending so much for so little benefit
As a Gamer, <scratches head>
This is basically the conclusion I reached. I don't recommend this to the gamer or general PC enthusiast. However if you do professional video editing or 3D work this may just be for you. If not the whole platform at least the D5400XS motherboard and a pair of normal 5400 series Xeons is certainly attractive.
Alright, I have to ask...
When are we going to see this bad boy with four Radeon 3870 X2s?
Come on, you had to be thinking it... Eight CPU cores, eight GPU cores... (Oh, and you really should have tested with four FB-DIMMs, it reduces latency, and increases memory bandwidth. It also would have gotten you eight GB of RAM.)
When are we going to see this bad boy with four Radeon 3870 X2s?
Come on, you had to be thinking it... Eight CPU cores, eight GPU cores... (Oh, and you really should have tested with four FB-DIMMs, it reduces latency, and increases memory bandwidth. It also would have gotten you eight GB of RAM.
)Those cards are only supported in dual mode and even then, the drivers aren't released to enable CF.Alright, I have to ask...
When are we going to see this bad boy with four Radeon 3870 X2s?
This has been answered several times earlier in the thread.(Oh, and you really should have tested with four FB-DIMMs, it reduces latency, and increases memory bandwidth. It also would have gotten you eight GB of RAM.
since when is a preview skulltrail board their standard test config?? i was, in fact, talking about their standard test config. please read, then post.
if your article was ONLY to prove which system was faster then you have a valid point that in some benchmarks the sli board is faster. i thought (perhaps mistakenly) that you guys like giving accurate results. in most reviews i've read, certainly the ones i give most credence to, the test configurations are as similar as possible.
how can you say ram doesn't improve framerates in games? are you kidding me?
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/memory/display/2gb-ram_7.html#sect0
it's a bit old but all i didn't spend much time looking. i know their benchmarks are far from "real world" resolutions but ram usage would only go up with resolution increase. back when source came out i saw a significant increase in my fps going from 512mb to 1gb on my athlon xp/9800pro system.
if you take a look at most of the signatures here (including your own, even though you mentioned going back to 2gb) you'll notice most people have 4gb of ram. the only reason i made this post is that i feel since you try and accurately demonstrate "real world" scenarios that maybe the standard test config should be updated.
i've felt this way for a little while but only now decided to ask the question. please don't take this as an attack as i have a great deal of respect for your reviews.
edit - found another example
http://www.bcchardware.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=3135&Itemid=40&limit=1&limitstart=2
looks to me like ram increases their gaming fps. yes, they used rc2 and yes the gfx card was only 256mb but there was a definite advantage to having 4gb. combine that with the fact that the games they used are nearly 2 years old as well it should be a valid example when comparing to a mature vista and todays games.
W... T... F...
Content creators would look for a board with more RAM slots to run RAM drives on or work with large data sets (Raw movie files and ungodly large photoshop pics etc). And maybe more USB ports to hook up external devices (graphic tablets, what ever strange input devices and lots of external drives to move big files around etc.)
$$$ Gamers would want a board that can do Tri-Fire or CF-X with fast RAM and good OC ability and options.
This monster of a board is a sick joke that seems to combine the worst aspects of gaming and server boards.
Content creators would look for a board with more RAM slots to run RAM drives on or work with large data sets (Raw movie files and ungodly large photoshop pics etc). And maybe more USB ports to hook up external devices (graphic tablets, what ever strange input devices and lots of external drives to move big files around etc.)
$$$ Gamers would want a board that can do Tri-Fire or CF-X with fast RAM and good OC ability and options.
This monster of a board is a sick joke that seems to combine the worst aspects of gaming and server boards.
Alright, I have to ask...
When are we going to see this bad boy with four Radeon 3870 X2s?
Come on, you had to be thinking it... Eight CPU cores, eight GPU cores... (Oh, and you really should have tested with four FB-DIMMs, it reduces latency, and increases memory bandwidth. It also would have gotten you eight GB of RAM.
Even though I personally think 4 sticks should have been used, I do understand where they used what Intel provided them to test. Infact, all of the reviews of Skulltrail that I've read, every single one of them only used the two sticks provided (atleast one of them didn't even have the sticks running in dual channel because they staggered the setup).
That being said, I do think that the review does a disservice to the 5000 series chipsets by not running the memory in quad channel and then harping on poor memory bandwidth in the review. But, this is as much Intels fault as is it is any of the reviewers since they are the ones who provided the memory.
My point was that in these tests the extra 2GB of RAM wasn't necessary for the 780i SLI system to match or beat the Skulltrail system. The point of the article though was to show you the reader if Skulltrail was worth the price or even if the thing was faster at all than a conventional single processor unit. We went with an 780i SLI board so that we could do real world testing with SLI on both platforms.
First off, I was specifically referring to 2GB vs. 4GB. However RAM doesn't equate to speed. Not directly. What it does do is prevent hitching and disk swapping during games. However between 2GB and 4GB I've never seen a difference in Vista. Again as I said earlier, the test systems don't have anything running in the background other than the OS itself. So those configurations won't need as much memory as you or I might.
You have to take the statement in its' proper context in order for it to make sense.
I've gone to 4GB in my own system because I needed it for Photoshop and multi-tasking in Vista. Not for my games. I've never seen a difference between 2GB and 4GB in my games. In fact in some instances on my old EVGA 680i SLI boards I prefered my 2GB configuration where my memory was run at 1143MHz instead of 800MHz. The speed was often more advantageous than the extra RAM is.
If there is one thing I've learned to do its' take flak. You can't have this type of job or any other for that matter and take things personally. If I did I'd quickly burn out and end up in the looney bin.
Again I think in the real world it can certainly make a difference if you have things running besides the games. I try not to but even on my own systems I usually do. You get anti-virus going, some other applications and pretty quickly you are cutting into your RAM on a 2GB system that your games could use.
AthlonXP
Fully [H]
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- Oct 14, 2001
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- 20,588
wow this thread has gotten alot of buzz over something most of us aren't going to buy.
Again this board supports up to 16GB of RAM. I don't think it needs more slots. It can also do Crossfire-X which frankly isn't useful at all to the professionals out there. If they are smart they'll be using Quadro's as they out perform their FireGL counterparts in almost every way and the FireGL drivers are horrid. So agian the Crossfire-X support is there for gamers. You can use 4 GPUs with this board. 3-Way SLI support isn't there, but I don't truly know if this is Intel's fault for not using nForce 200 MCPs like NVIDIA says, or if it boils down to NVIDIA reserving 3-Way SLI for thier more high end 680i SLI and 780i SLI chipset based boards.
As for features the D5400XS has everything a normal enthusiast and workstation board would have. 10USB ports is enough (since you get USB hubs on most monitors and they are really cheap if you needed to buy one) and you get 2 eSATA ports. With four PCIe x16 slots you have the option to use high end drive controllers or whatever else you want to use. Yes more RAM slots would be nice, but I can't agree that it is necessary.
I think this board needs more options in BIOS. They don't have any power management settings, no control over C1E, TM2, or SpeedStep in the BIOS and they certainly could use more overclocking options and a lot more voltage controls. The BIOS is really the achillies heal of this board. If they'd work on the BIOS this board would be attractive for use with some lower end Xeons and massive overclocking. This would increase the D5400XS's appeal by quite a bit.
There is one final thing that baffles me. And that's the fact that Intel only included one NIC on this board. I don't need two NICs on most of my computers, but since that's where the bar has been set for any high end board I can't understand why there isn't another one. It seems a shame to waste an expansion slot on a NIC if you really needed two, but that's about my only real complaint about the hardware itself. (Aside from FB-DIMMs.)
The things is the $$$ Cards that the ultimate gamers (the target of this board) will buy are dual slot for sure and they will want to stuff the max number of cards in there. With the current layout the max is thus 3 cards. With Tri-SLI a no-go for sure and no words on Tri-Fire they should have scraped the third slot and put some PCI there instead. The 4th can stay for PCI-E IO cards.
I disagree with that. I prefer the four PCIe x16 layout even if 3-Way SLI is a no go. You can still do four GPU Crossfire-X or you can do a combination of cards. Two video cards, a RAID controller and another video card that's single slot for multi-monitor support. The only PCI device I would want is a Creative X-Fi. Everything else I'd keep PCIe if possible.
McCartney
Gawd
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- Mar 6, 2006
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- 866
Hey Dan
Is it true that with all 4 slots of ddr2 being used it'd perform betteR?
Is it true that with all 4 slots of ddr2 being used it'd perform betteR?
What I know about the chipset and other boards running quad-channel memory configurations suggests that it would be more than likely, but as I said, I don't think the gains would be huge in games or even many applications.
NUMA on the Opteron platform allowed for more bandwidth than regular systems of the day but very few applications took advantage of it. UT2004 was the only game I can remember that actually bennefited from the raw memory bandwidth. Mostly database applications bennefited from it and some applications actually performed worse with NUMA enabled.
Therefore I wouldn't expect quad channel memory support to totally make up for the difference between 800MHz FB-DIMMs and 1066MHz low latency modules all the time. Again it is unfortunate that Intel didn't send us four modules to test with, but I can't change that. I agree with Kyle not wanting to invest in FB-DIMMs just for one article considering platforms like this aren't something we generally look at. I wasn't going to spring for the extra modules either though I would like to see quad-channel results myself.
McCartney
Gawd
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Francois the guy who made skulltrail said that it's easy to buy the 800 mhz fb-dimms and put skulltrail quad channel at 3-3-3-12. If you can really do that on skulltrail on microns, I am seriously impressed.
Francois certainly knows his stuff and if he says its' possible then I don't doubt it. One day I may find out for myself.
McCartney
Gawd
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Dude, I came my pants thinking about quad channel 8gb ddr800 at 3-3-3-12. That's faster than DDR2 1066 isn't it?
I thought latencies like that make ad ifference on Ddr2
I thought latencies like that make ad ifference on Ddr2
thats hot
Although there definitely are certain workstation/server apps that might take advantage of the additional memory bandwidth afforded by quad channel, what you're stating is very true for the vast number of cases. An example which I can relate to you quantitatively is F@H. With 4 FB-DIMMs I saw a corresponding drop of only 10-20 seconds per frame per SMP client. That's nearly negligible when 2 FB-DIMM modules average approximately 14:25 per frame at the same frequency.
For certain things it just doesn't pay to get the extra modules. This motherboard is not being marketed as a server board, and people considering it won't use it as a server, hence the 4 memory slots, hence the single onboard NIC, hence the 4 PCI-E 16X slots, hence the OC BIOS, ad infinitum. There are plenty of 6 and 8-RAM slot boards with all the server goodies onboard like the Asus linked earlier for those who are dissatisfied with the D5400XS should look into. Criticism here is misdirected.
Such is the case with all halo products. Look at exotic cars produced by large automotive manufacturers. Ex. Ford GT or Audi R8. Who's going to buy these? Nevertheless, they garner a lot of attention for those manufacturers in the hope some of that attention is directed towards their other products.
Agreed.
4video card motherboard is asking to be vaporware. All I care about is the dual socket processors. There's no point in having a tri-quad videocard since what am I suppose to do with my soundcard and or with my tv turner card???? All we need is one good highend videocard and that's more than enough.
There's onboard sound and PCI-E TV tuners or USB-based solutions...
In any case, there are so many motherboards that could better fit your needs already available and for less money. I could probably list a dozen or more. No need to wait for Skulltrail.
McCartney
Gawd
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- Mar 6, 2006
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I'm gonna run 4 nVidia cards when possible.
Yes but why would I want to go out and buy another TV Turner card when I already have a good one? Onboard soundcard isn't the same.[this only apply to board like skulltrail]
What do you mean by many motherboards? Are you talking about dual socket?
The problem with the other dual socket Intel motherboard out there right now is that most don't take DDR2-800. I don't think it's compatible with the latest 45nm Hapertown Xeon chip out right now.
But if you do know some good dual socket motherboards out there, please let me know.
You use multiple TV tuners so that you can record more then one program at the same time, or record one, while watching another live.
There are 9 5400 chipset boards on Newegg that take 800 mhz FB-Dimms and all allow the use of Harpertown processors.
And you think Skulltrail will be cheap?
It certainly won't be any cheaper than the other 5400 chipset boards.
I would probably buy the skulltrail if it's around $600. The only thing that will be holding me back are the extra PCIe16 slots. No point of buying an expensive server board when you can't OC it.
I don't know why the extra PCIe x16 slots would put anyone off. That is the feature that interests me the most about the D5400XS board. I can make use of at least three of the PCIe x16 slot. Two 8800GTX's and a PCIe RAID controller to be specific.
You are missing the point of what server boards are supposed to be used for. Server boards used for server systems don't need to be overclocked. However the D5400XS is a enthusiast board built on server technology. It just happens to overclock poorly on its' own.
Why are you so worried about overclocking with it? I'm willing to bet the ram had something to do with overclock, try some 1333 fsb xeons with 800 mhz ram and see where you get. Plenty of people were pad modding the 1066 xeons to run at 1333 and had no problems doing it.
I'd rather have PCIX slot honestly.
To me this seems like a gaming+work system, I'd be interested in that, but lack of PCIX kills it for me. I could live without that if it wasn't for the FB memory.
If I had existing PCI-X cards I wanted to install in the system, then yes I'd agree, but if you are building a new system there is no reason I can think of not to go all PCI-Express.
Anyway I agree 100% with your comment that this is a platform meant for a gaming+work system. Again it is like a Aston Martin or something. There are plenty of things just as fast, just not as nice. Unlike the Aston Martin though, this is not only high end but specialized. Specialized for the gamer, and CAD/3D Studio Max/Maya crowd.