Skulltrail has so finally arrived and despite the failure of AMD’s 4×4 and the lackluster V8, Intel is now ready to take on the extreme enthusiast market. Skulltrail is basically Intel’s specially designed D5400XS motherboard, but one should not forget about the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775 CPU, the brain(s) of the system. Two of these Xeon-related processors have been installed into the sockets of Intel’s D5400XS motherboard and since the sockets are of the LGA771 format, the motherboard lacks support for regular Core 2 processors.
They operate at 3.2GHz and sport 1600MHz FSB and 12MB L2 cache each. Even if these are some impressive specifications, it’s the Skulltrail motherboard that really stands out. Beside the Extreme processors, D5400XS also sports FB-DIMM, Quad SLI and CrossFireX, including close to every other imaginable feature. The motherboard looks like a hybrid between a regular enthusiast motherboard and a server board, which is probably what Intel was going for.
Skulltrail is an enthusiast platform for the truly extreme users, and when it comes to multithreaded performance it is beyond any comparable system. Games and not so multithreaded applications are held back by the FB-DIMMs though. It’s not by much and the big problem with Skulltrail is not the FB-DIMMs per se, but the high price. Just the motherboard, processors and 4GB of FB-DIMM will cost you several thousands of dollars.
Below are a couple of Intel Skulltrail reviews;
:: HardOCP :: TechReport :: HotHardware :: ExtremeTech :: TechGage ::
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