Skulltrail

Driver Heaven regulars will remember our Intel V8 preview from last year, which was a direct reply to AMD's QuadFX system. The V8 system was the pinnacle of CPU power and it left AMD's solution quaking in the dust. AMD have since ended the QuadFX platform, however Intel are not resting on their laurels and the result? Yep, Skulltrail.

Skulltrail was initially reported to support Triple and Quad SLI since the motherboard has four x16 PCI Express lands, however this has claim been dropped in recent months. Nvidia made the following statement.

"There are rumors that 3-way SLI on Skulltrail could be enabled with a driver from NVIDIA. Just wanted to inform you that Skulltrail motherboards use two NVIDIA nForce 100 SLI MCPs. The nForce 100 SLI chip allows a maximum of two GeForce graphics cards to work together, enabling SLI between two GeForce GPUs such as the GeForce 8800 GTX, and enables Quad SLI on dual-GPU graphics boards such as the GeForce 7950 GX2. The nForce 100 SLI MCP will NOT support 3-way SLI. This cannot change even with a driver/bios update."

Additional rumours are circulating that this is not entirely true and Intel are refuting these claims, but I will not dwell on this, all we need to worry about right now is, only standard SLI is supported. You have to admit however, having both Crossfire and SLI support on the one motherboard is rather impressive, even if it is only a dual setup.

The D5400XS motherboard is based on the Stoakley platform and 45nm Harpertown Xeons but you won't find any PCI-X slots on board. Here is the specification:

CPU support	Dual LGA771-based Core 2 Extreme and Xeon processors
South bridge	Intel 6321ESB ICH
North bridge	Intel 5400 MCH
Interconnect	PCIe x4 + DMI x4
Expansion slots	4 PCI Express x16 (PCIe 1.1) via dual Nvidia nForce 100 switches 2 32-bit PCI
Memory	4 240-pin FB-DIMM sockets Maximum of 16GB of DDR2-667/800 FB-DIMM memory
Storage I/O	1 ATA/100 port 6 Serial ATA 3Gbps ports with RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 support
Audio	8-channel HD audio via 6321ESB and SigmaTel STAC9274D5 codec
Connectivity	2 eSATA with RAID 0,1 support via Marvell 88SE6121 6 USB 2.0 with headers for 4 more 1 RJ45 Ethernet 10/100/1000 via Intel 82573L 1 IEEE1394 (FireWire) with header for 1 more via TI TSB43AB22A 1 analog front out 1 analog center/LFE out 1 analog rear out 1 analog surround out/line in 1 analog mic in 1 TOS-Link digital S/PDIF out 1 HD Audio front-panel header for analog headphone out and mic in 1 HD Audio Link header 1 3-pin S/PDIF out header 1 Consumer Infrared front-panel receiver header 1 Consumer Infrared transmitter header
Form factor	EATX (13" x 12") with LGA775-style mounting holes for cooling

The D5400XS is probably the most well equipped board I have handled. For example it has onboard 8 channel audio which is Dolby Home Theater capable, with both Pro Logic II and Dolby Digital Live Processing.

The motherboard is larger than a standard home enthusiast board and is built to eATX (extended ATX) specifications which you commonly find in server and workstation markets. You can clearly see the dual processor sockets and the PCIe x16 slots.

The board is kitted out with various power conditioning components around the CPU as you can see in the images above. The Zalman coolers that intel sent with the kit are rather large and as the area is cramped it was a tight fit. Even though this is 771 slot, the board takes standard 775 fittings, so if you already own a modern Intel board the fitting mounts can be transferred across.

The Intel 5400 north bridge (seen in top picture between the two Zalman coolers), is a workstation chipset that features an FB-DIMM DDR2 memory controller. FB-DIMMS are more expensive than standard DDR2 memory and they also consume more power as well, they also have higher latency figures. They can make up for this by offering tremendous amounts of bandwidth. This particular board has only 4 FB-DIMM slots, but each one of these slots is connected to a memory channel in the Intel 5400 north bridge. This north bridge has two seperate memory "branches" with two channels each.

When this board is fully populated it can sustain a peak throughout of 25.6GB/S to the main memory, which is enough to saturate its dual 1600mhz front side buses, bear in mind that standard 800mhz DDR has a bandwidth of 6.4gb/s. While Intel only sent 2x2GB modules, we felt this deserved to be tested properly, so we ordered a further two modules, letting us thoroughly test both dual and quad memory settings. More on this shortly.