DH Review: Intel Skulltrail Platform

Zardon

Read The Review Here
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Skulltrail. Even the name sounds mean. If you haven't heard the codename before now then we have a treat in store for you today. Skulltrail is a high end desktop PC platform based on Xeon class workstation processors. How does Dual Cpu, 8 Cores, four graphics card slots, dual 1600mhz front side buses with a total of 25.6 GB/s of bandwidth grab you?

Great, now that I have your attention, let me preface the testing. Driver Heaven missed the NDA launch a while ago. Not because we were being lazy, but we decided to spend considerable time with the system and explore some avenues no one else has touched upon yet, such as installing a full set of four modules to get Quad memory bandwidth and testing it with both high end Crossfire and SLI components, we also worked with Intel and received a newer BIOS for testing, but more on that later.

If this isn't enough we then decided to overclock the hell out of it with watercooling to give you guys the best and most thorough review we can. If you are lucky enough to have the money to afford a system like this when it is released then you will definitely want to know how it performs under every situation, both with real world testing and with synthetic benchmarks.

Zardon

Lelisevis

The extra time you took was well worth it, excellent review of jaw-dropping hardware. Wouldnt like the electricity bill at the end of the month though. I get the feeling the room it was set-up in got a bit toasty, it would certainly keep you warm in the winter.

Congrats DH on an outstanding review.

Falstaff

a new benchmark has been established I'd wager..excellent review.

Zelig

Awesome...

No legacy ports is nice, I'd even like to see the pata connectors for optical drives gone.

Would aircooling at a reasonably low volume be possible for that rig, or does it put out too much heat?

Veridian3

For the stock speeds it wouldn't be too much of a problem, something like a coolermaster cosmos for example would be ideal

dj_stick

jealous
so very jealous

damn powerful system, really thorough review

mike2h

thx for a terrific review of an awsome platform! ty for all the time & effort.
now if i can just win the lottery....

Falstaff

I see it as a damn good graphics platform OC'd at 4 and with CS3 running and a monstrous monitor..thats my dream config. Even from a purely pedestrian standpoint as I am, it sure compares favorably against the V8.

geraldmango

bloody nora, thats amazing. CPU power galore.

Great review Z, very thorough, great to see the quad mem scores too, heard a lot about that but no one seemed to cover it.

Maybe CS4 will use all 8 cores. would be interesting to see filters running on that sucker.

Vikingod

That was probably the most thorough review I have read in years, and it was totally worth it.

Now, the matter of boxing it up and sending it to me, my address is....

IvanV

Congratulations on your great work on this article, I am fully impressed. The system is amazing overall, but it wasn't the sheer performance that took me by surprise, I was more or less expecting that, it was the power consumption so much lower than the V8 (which otherwise mostly put up a good fight). I usually don't care about that aspect too much, but this time I am making an exception. Also, the performance scaling is great. To make it short, this really seems to be the ultimate system for anyone demanding high CPU performance.

Vikingod

I'm surprized the gaming benchmarks we're more impressive, even Crysis didn't seem to require the power.

The OCing is unbelievable though, though who are into that are going to want to save your pennies.

Zardon

Yes, I had to put on an airconditioner with both it and the IntelV8 running. The test room got really warm without it. With the side panel off, you could really feel the heat escaping - a portion of this however did come from the graphics cards.

Also with regards to the watercooling, I have to say those Corsair Nautilus 500's for an entry level "all in one" configuration do a fine job, however after 3 or 4 hours gaming the water got rather warm (at 4.2ghz with the higher voltage), they still coped admirably though. I am sure however that someone thinking of buying this system would invest in a high end configuration costing 3 times as much. Load temperatures would probably drop a further 5-10c.

All in all though, I have to stress just how rock solid the platform is. Just like the Intel V8 system these machines rarely, if ever BSOD. I think the Intel V8 has BSOD'd ONCE in a year, which I put down to a beta set of drivers. I have yet to see the Skulltrail doing it. Perhaps the fully buffered memory has a bit of a hand in this.

For those interested in the whole fully buffered memory deal there are plenty of great reads about it on the internet and a good place to start is the wikipedia pages.

"Fully Buffered DIMM architecture introduces an Advanced Memory Buffer (AMB) between the memory controller and the memory module. Unlike the parallel bus architecture of traditional DRAMs, an FB-DIMM has a serial interface between the memory controller and the AMB. This enables an increase to the width of the memory without increasing the pin count of the memory controller beyond a feasible level. With this architecture, the memory controller does not write to the memory module directly, rather it is done via the AMB. The AMB can thus compensate for signal deterioration by buffering and resending the signal. In addition, the AMB can also offer error correction, without posing any overhead on the processor or the memory controller. It can also use the Bit Lane Failover Correction feature to identify bad data paths and remove them from operation, which dramatically reduces command/address errors. Also, since reads and writes are buffered, they can be done in parallel by the memory controller. This allows simpler interconnects, more memory bandwidth, and (in theory) hardware-agnostic memory controller chips (such as DDR2 and DDR3) which can be used interchangeably. The downside to this approach is that it introduces latency to the memory request."

Will be interesting to see how this story develops over the coming months......

craig5320

Monster job on a Monster review for a Monster system.

Can really tell the work you've put into it Allan really nice job, system looks amazing, to think this could be an entry-level PC in 5 years time ;-) maybe not...

swimtech

Killer review Zardon - thoughtfully thorough as never before! The flaming skull is just outstanding too!

DJ - I'd be getting a bit giddy if I were you, considering this review!

Alex

what a review ! all the information I ever needed, and then some. Between this and the X2 article you guys put up a week or so ago DH is smokin hot at the minute !

I am very very impressed with Intel getting the power consumption down so low, especially considering the performance. Where on earth are AMD to answer all these processors? It really is a one horse race right now.

dj_stick

haha my system won't have quite that much power… only 2.8ghz per CPU, and a single 8800 GT…

i'm not complaining though

BiGBrOwNPimpsta

best review to date of hardware on DH imo...

but any person that will buy this for leisure and gaming, you are a f*cking moron! for video editing this is DAMN nice to do a business write off for.

humonous

yeah I agree with pimpsta. best review ive seen on any site, never mind DH.

system is a bit overkill for gaming , but its a sweet technological demo of what we might be running in a few years to get the most out of games.

I love the rendering times, if I could afford it, would be on my list. just out of my league.

LukeK

took me about an hour to read this!

fantastic review DH, was very pleased to see the quad memory performance as well as a lot of the real world testing.