Skulltrail

Skulltrail or mouldy old bones? Josh Collins finds out whether Skulltrail will pwn or be pwned.

Packing two QX9775 processors, the socket 771 cousins of the socket 775 QX9770, the Skulltrail platform is a dual socket enthusiast solution, featuring two 3.2GHz Intel Core 2 Extreme quad core processors based on the 45nm manufacturing process. If utilising a dual socket solution wasn’t enough to whet your appetite, it’s only the tip of overkill (and we mean that in such a good way) iceberg that is this insanely specced platform.

Following the dual socket design, the motherboard is based on the Workstation-ATX, or WATX, form factor to accommodate all the tech while still conforming to current, past and future case specifications. With two processors, four FB-DIMM slots, four PCIe 16x slots and additional PCI slots, it’s no wonder the motherboard is so huge.

If we consider for a moment the second workstation-like feature on the motherboard you’ll notice the memory used on this platform is FB-DIMM specification memory. This is an interesting but logical choice. With the inclusion of two sockets the processors need to, at times, access the same memory banks as one another, therefore order is needed when it comes to the memory addressing process. The FB-DIMM specification allows for this seamless communication and integration to take place. There are, however, a few down sides of utilising this specification.

One such down side is the sheer cost of the memory – for anyone who thinks DDR3 is expensive, you may wish to avoid looking up quality FB-DIMM memory prices. This cost, along with the asking price of two Core 2 Extreme processors and a motherboard as feature-packed and complicated as the D5400XS further rules this platform out as a piece of kit that will ever find its way into Joe Average’s rig.

The FB-DIMM also brings with it a decrease in memory frequency and timings compared to enthusiast DDR2. The kit used to review this platform was a 2x 2GB engineering sample from Micron. An interesting fact to note is that the BIOS for the D5400XS under the memory settings had voltages for both DDR2 and DDR3 specification ICs and a side note specifying this fact. Unfortunately we were not able to clarify the IC type used on the engineering samples prior to going to print and as such we remained at or close to the stock specifications of 800MHz 5-5-5-15 2T. It was suspected the IC was a variety of the DDR2 Micron D9 series IC, however we felt it best to get Atomicans results and a review rather than blowing out the memory!

Just because we couldn’t go nuts with the memory didn’t mean we couldn’t go nuts with the CPUs – mmm… that sounds cool, plural CPUs.



Using air cooling we found both the CPUs and the motherboard to be quite happy to play the overclocking game with us. Out of the gates we started off at the stock 3.2GHz to get our an idea of the performance we could expect. First and foremost – wow! When it comes to outright number crunching power there is no other enthusiast platform that can touch this system and we’re only at stock frequencies so far. The sheer grunt of eight physical cores based on Intel’s 45nm Core micro-architecture completes benchmarks such as wPrime and CineBench R10 with ease due to the applications’ completely multi-threaded nature. It’s no surprise then that when crunching single threaded applications it’s as fast, if not a little slower, then it’s socket 775 45nm dual core and quad core brethren.

For those wondering why the single threaded applications are slower, if only ever so slightly, the reason for this is because of the FB-DIMM memory running at only 800MHz and with loose timings – relative to enthusiast DDR2 – of 5-5-5-15 2T. Without the memory throughput to feed the application to the processor, the system will run sub-standard compared to a similarly clocked socket 775 45nm dual core or quad core setup with enthusiast DDR2 memory and even more of a difference when comparing to a tweaked DDR3 platform – again, check out the review of the QX9770 and compare the results.



Like the 45nm socket 775 quad cores, the socket 771 QX9775 overclocks like a bat out of hell. Using just air cooling we managed to top out at an awe inspiring 4.4GHz on all eight cores. The amount of processing power this then handed to multi-threaded applications was amazing. At the time of printing, the Skulltrail platform tested in the Atomic labs was the second fastest outright at processing wPrime 32M on the HWBot database. Second only to a four processor, 16 core, AMD Opteron system – fear not, we do intend to go sub-zero but that chapter will have to wait for now.

One area we’ve not yet touched upon and perhaps one of, if not the, most interesting parts of this platform and motherboard is the inclusion of SLI on an Intel chipset. This is achieved through integrating the NVIDIA nForce 100 SLI chip into the motherboard – unfortunately things aren’t all ice cream and cherries. The nForce 100 SLI chip featured in the Skulltrail D5400XS motherboard is the same as found in the NVIDIA 680i SLI. This means in a 3-Way SLI configuration a maximum of 8x lanes per card are available. In the end, it’s no surprise that NVIDIA kept the nForce 200 SLI chipset for the 780i SLI motherboards, thus securing the premium end of the 3-Way SLI market for itself, with 16x lanes per each of the three slots.

Not content with just SLI support on the motherboard, the Skulltrail platform also features CrossFire capability, with four slots available to potentially play host to CrossFire X... when the drivers are finally finished (who knows, by the time you read this they could be done!). Thanks to the Skulltrail platform provided being an Alpha sample, complete driver support for SLI and CrossFire – of all multi-card sorts – was still under development and undergoing final internal testing. There’s no doubt we’ll take a look at this when the opportunity becomes available.

At the end of the day, if you have a wad of cash you just must spend on pants loads of completely drool worthy hardware than you could do much worse than the Skulltrail platform. Keep an eye out as these systems become available from OEM partners as there’s yet to be confirmation on standalone purchase potential.

Ludicrously fast, no doubt crazily expensive but my goodness, we certainly think it looks damn cool and runs bloody quick!