Skulltrail reviewed: Is it the ultimate gaming mainboard?

AMD released a dual CPU-platform for Socket-Fcalled Quad FX in November 2006. Customers' choice of CPUs was limited to Socket-F-server-CPUs and the Athlon FX, but standard-DDR2-memory could be used. Quad FX was a failure nontheless, because the performance of two CPUs wasn't good enough to compete with Intel. Unfortunately Phenom-CPUs don't work in a Quad-FX-board.

in spring 2007, Intel had an answer to AMDs Quad FX: V8. A V8-system consisted of two Xeon-server-CPUs with codename Clovertown for the quadcores and DDR2-FB-DIMMs, expensive memory with error correction. V8-mainboards mostly had Intel's i5000X-chipset ("Seaburg"). Anyhow, V8 never made it into the desktop market because of the lack of overclocking options in the BIOS and the necessity to use server CPUs and FB-DIMMs.

Now Intel's V8-successor Skulltrail shall manage to have an impact on the desktop market. The Skulltrail mainboard of our test is called Intel D5400XS, which is an advanced i5000X-chipset. Therefore, only Sockek-771-Server-CPUs and FB-DIMMs can be used with Skulltrail. Unlike V8, Skulltrail has a ton of overclocking options in the BIOS.

Features:
Skulltrail is a highend mainboard in EATX format that has two CPU sockets and four video card slots with PCI-Express-1.1 and 16 lanes each. Thanks to the Nvidia Nforce 100 chip, SLI and Crossfire can be used with this board. A very long SLI bridge is included in the packaging. The fastest Socket-771-CPU right now is the QX9775 which is the counterpart of the Desktop-CPU QX9770. Both CPUs are not out yet, but the QX9770 is already listed in the PC Games Hardware pricewatch for about 1,200 Euro. The QX9775 has four cores with 3.2 GHz each.






Our test system consists of the following components:
Intel D5400XS (Skulltrail)
Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775 (Sockel 771)
4 x 2.048 Mebibyte DDR2-FB-DIMMS PC-667 (320 MHz, 5-5-5-15) from Corsair
Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS (G92) with Forceware 169.25
Enermax Galaxy 1.000 Watt
Western Digital Raptor 150 Gigabyte
Windows Vista Ultimate x64


Eight cores and eight Gibibyte of RAM - what for?
To find out whether a Skulltrail system is worth getting for gamers we used synthetic and game benchmarks that profit from four cores over two. Applications that have no increased performance when switching from two cores to four, will also not run faster on eight cores. We ran the following benchmarks with the Skulltrail system and one CPU with 8 GiByte of memory and after that we used the same config, but inserted the second CPU.





The BIOS:
















Benchmarks: Four cores versus eight:




















Overclocking:
A seperate overclocking test of the Skulltrail setup will follow soon at our PC Games Hardware Extreme forums. Unfortunately Skulltrail needs 57 seconds after hitting the power button to actually show the post screen. And in case the system is overclocked too far and does not boot, one CPU has to be removed in order to clear the CMOS. Therefore, overclocking on the D5400XS takes some time. Nonetheless we made a quick OC test and the system booted just fine at eight times 4 GHz using increased voltages.

Noise and power consumption:
The Skulltrail board only has a single fan. That small fan is part of the cooler that sits on the northbridge and the Nforce 100 chip. That fan is being controlled by the mainboard, but for whatever reason that controller only works 25 percent of the time. That means, the fan is screaming when running at full speed. It is almost inaudible when the motherboard is reducing the fan's rpm. A BIOS update should fix that issue.

For the power consumtion test, we used two Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTX instead of the 8800 GTS (G92). At bootup, the kill-a-watt displays 350 W. During 2D-load running Cinebench R10, the system reaches 460 W and while running 3DMark06, 520 W are pulled from the wall. That is still ok, considering a QX6850, Nvidia 780i and three Geforce 8800 GTX need 819 W.

Conclusion:
Skulltrail still has some issues like the fan controller and the long bootup procedure. Hopefully those issues will be fixed in the retail revision of the board. A fully equipped Skulltrail system is quite expensive. Because of that gamers should not even think about getting Skulltrail as long as most games don't even support four cores. Highend freaks and extreme overclockers should have an eye on Skulltrail as it has shown to have a slightly better performance than a quadcore system. Now memory manufacturers have to release some faster DDR2-FB-DIMMs, so performance would even increase.