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LOSTCIRCUITS	SHORTCUTS: The Ultimate Dream Machine Snoops and Filters Intels Snoop Filter Implementation SkullTrail Extreme D5400SX System Configurations Power Play 3D Rendering and Energy Efficiency Cinebench DVD-Shrink, MainConcept VirtualDub / DivX 6.8 3DMark'06 World In Conflict Crysis F.E.A.R. UnrealTournament3 The Final Analysis Give Us Some Feedback on this Article
Intel's SkullTrail Extreme Platform Playground of the Titans
(Author: Michael Schuette, February 10, 2008)

Hardware Feature Wish List Revisited

Back to the system wish list. It appears as if our wishes were heard, at least partially, since Intel’s latest server chipset based on the the 5400 MCH does support SLI out of the box and without the requirement for any special drivers. Combine this with the proverbial Intel quality and some (limited) overclocking and tweaking capabilities primarily regarding the host and PCIe bus frequencies, CPU multiplier and CPU and NorthBridge voltages. The result is called SkullTrail Extreme, powered in this case by two of the finest “Yorkfield-F” Xeon 9775 Quad Damage processors running at 3.2 GHz. We also had two 2GB 800 MHz FBDIMMs but it turned out that four DIMMs with 1GB density each gave better performance, even though they were only running at 667 MHz. In a perfect world, we would also have a pair of nVidia GeForce 8800 GTX at our disposal, however, the world is not perfect and we had to content ourselves with a pair of GeForce 7900 GTX, which for all purposes of system benchmarking work just fine.

Note the dual 8-pin CPU power connectors to provide the necesssary juice for the two CPUs to the motherboard. Quite frankly, this is overkill as we will show in the power section of this article. Four PCIe 16x slots are interspersed with two standard PCI slots, otherwise, the SkullTrail Extreme has everything one could possibly wish for with the exception of wireless Ethernet connectivity, which is excusable given the predominant projection for this board to fill a server chassis. For SLI or Crossfire, Intel recommends the use of the top two PCIe slots, which essentially eliminates the accessibility of the two PCI slots.

Key Specs at One Glance

The size of the board is not meant for a mid tower, but it will fit any eATX case such as CoolerMaster Cosmos, Thermaltake Armor or Gigabyte Aurora to mention a few. Otherwise, we have pretty much everything we asked for (with the exception of DDR3), so let’s put this Behemoth on the test bench and see how it performs. One caveat in this regard is that there are only a handful of applications that support more than four processors. Most standard applications, especially in the genre of games are still single-threaded, there are a few multithreaded exceptions but even those are capped to two CPUs or maybe four. Notable exceptions are Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Autodesk 3dsmax 2008, POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 23, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Cinebench R10, ProShow Gold, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, TMPGEnc Xpress 4.4, Microsoft Flight Simulator X, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Capcom LostPlanet Extreme Conditions DX10 Demo, IceStorm Fighters Demo, Microsoft Office Excel 2007…

As it turns out, aside from Microsoft Office Excel 2007, relatively few real products profit from more than four cores. Well, this is not exactly true, there is still Caligari TrueSpace, which even in the earlier versions runs very well on 8 cores (the latest 7.5 version supports some 1000 cores or so). Lightwave 3D supposedly also supports multiple cores, as do the latest renditions of SolidWorks and ProEngineer. Then there is DVD-Shrink and there is MainConcept and a few other applications that we’ll look into.

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