Intel's Skulltrail high-end dual socket mobo review at Tech Report

[Farid]

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14052

Scott Wasson put together a really nice piece, including a wide array of test platforms. Good read.

This is what Vysez wants for his birthday. Take notes, folks!

Quick description:

Skulltrail. If you hang around these parts, you've been hearing that codename bandied about for the better part of a year now. Not only does it have the distinction of being, quite probably, the single coolest codename known to all of geekdom, but it's also attached to the sort of hardware required to back up the copious bravado it implies. You see, Skulltrail is a high-end desktop PC platform based on workstation-class chips taken from Intel's Xeon parts shelf. We're talking about some wicked numbers here, such as dual sockets, eight cores, four graphics card slots, and dual 1600MHz front-side buses with a total of 25.6GB/s of bandwidth.

A few thanks going to AMD for making this possible:

We probably have AMD to thank for Skulltrail's existence. When it couldn't keep up with Intel by delivering four cores per socket, the firm hatched its Quad FX scheme and pledged to make enthusiast-class dual-socket motherboards a part of its long-term technology direction. That direction was to include an upgrade to dual quad-core Phenom processors as soon as they became available. Of course, AMD has since canceled Quad FX and failed to provide the promised upgrade path for owners of Quad FX systems, but Skulltrail was already deep into development by the time AMD peed down its leg. End result: Intel makes good on its answer to AMD's promises. I can live with that.

A few results (there's a ton more in the article):

Gaming related:

Offline related:

 

[AlNom]

The Twins!

Why does it do worse in the BioShock bench (Just started reading btw)

edit: ah... DDR3 vs DDR2 perhaps.

edit2: oh neat, Lost Planet supports 8 cores! I wonder what it's doing...

 

[INKster]

A quality product by Intel (with a few rough edges).

Yet, i'm baffled by this "absolute necessity" of having built-in "dual-quad SLI" support. Why not a single NF200 (PCIe 2.0), instead of two NF100's (PCIe 1.1 only) ?
This also rules out three-way SLI, by the way.
Not only those Nvidia chips seem to be very expensive (100 bucks, each), but they also increase power consumption and heat output significantly.

I would happily trade those NF100 chips by an additional 4-port SATA 3Gb/s controller. Crossfire and PCIe 2.0 support is sufficient, in my opinion.

 

[Thorburn]

Hopefully should get a chance to play with one of these in the near future, not sure I could ever justify the cost but it is cool such a thing exists.

edit2: oh neat, Lost Planet supports 8 cores! I wonder what it's doing...

The AI of the flying insect creatures in the second half of the benchmark (cave) is multithreaded, presumably the control of the creatures being split across however many cores are available?

Interestingly on each run the creatures exhibit slightly different behaviour, but the test still manages to be extremely consistant over repeated runs.

 

[MfA]

I'd rather they would move to WTX if they are going to try to create an enthousiast market. FB-DIMMs are a horrible compromise for this kind of system. They are slow and expensive, if you need a lot of modules per channel they make some sense .... but in this system their only redeeming quality is that they offer large capacity modules so you can get 16 GB in a smallish space.

 

[Skrying]

I would happily trade those NF100 chips by an additional 4-port SATA 3Gb/s controller. Crossfire and PCIe 2.0 support is sufficient, in my opinion.

Who is using more than two hard drives in this level of gaming rig? If you've got this amount of pointless cash to spend why not just build a cheap file server with much more functionality?

Anyway, I hate these types of products. It's simply fueling the "enthusiast" behavior in buying a almost entirely pointless product for that last 5%, which in this case doesn't exist in games.

 

[MfA]

Flash SSDs are about to become dirt cheap (relatively speaking, for people who would buy something like this). With access times ~.1 ms even non parallel software can make use of quite a lot of storage throughput, think game loading times, RAID SSDs will be all the rage this year.

PS. networks can't push that kind of data (well not unless you get some high end Infiniband gear, which is relatively expensive even for most people who would buy this board).

 

[Skrying]

Flash SSDs are about to become dirt cheap (relatively speaking, for people who would buy something like this). With access times ~.1 ms even non parallel software can make use of quite a lot of storage throughput, think game loading times, RAID SSDs will be all the rage this year.

PS. networks can't push that kind of data (well not unless you get some high end Infiniband gear, which is relatively expensive even for most people who would buy this board).

Huh? Are you seriously going to be using more than 6 drives of any type in this system? Seriously, would love to hear a real reason for that. Media? I hope not, horribly inefficient and why run such a beast of a system when not needed? Editing? Sure, but more than 6 drives worth of files that you constantly need? I'm not talking about dynamically streaming off of a file server, that's insane and I don't really know why that thought came to your mind. I don't see anyone needing constant access to that much space and need it at local system speeds.

 

[MfA]

You asked about more than 2