Intel Skulltrail
Skulltrail is an enthusiast
Skulltrail was one of the first platforms to support
Chipset) to support both SLI and CrossFire with public drivers at the time of release. The HP Firebird 803 also supported SLI on one (proprietary, MXM) motherboard at the time, but the drivers were special and only available for Firebird hardware.Public demonstrations
Intel demonstrated Skulltrail at the Fall 2007
Skulltrail has a
System components
Core 2 Extreme QX9775
- Four processor coresin one processor package
- 3.2 GHz clock frequency
- 1600 MHz FSB
- Fabricated on 45 nmprocess
- 12 MiB L2 cache(6 MiB per core pair)
Intel D5400XS motherboard
- Two processors)
- Four FB-DIMMslots supporting maximum 16 GB of system memory at 800 MHz
- Four x16 PCI Express 1.1a slots
- Two PCI2.3 slots
- Six SATA 3.0 Gbit/sports
- Two eSATAports
- Ten USB ports
Criticisms and issues
Although found to be an extremely powerful computing platform, Skulltrail was criticized by media outlets for being "ahead of its time". This is in part due to the lack of support for multi-core computing with almost all popular game engines at the time, in addition to the extremely high price of the components involved. The use of FB-DIMMs due to the workstation chipset has also been pointed at as a major limiting factor for Skulltrail.[1][2][3] although this limitation can be mitigated by purchasing specially designed Kingston HyperX FB-DIMMS that have a lower latency than generic FB-DIMMs[4]
The base Skulltrail platform consists of an Intel D5400XS mainboard which cost upwards of US$600 when it hit the market as a standalone part. Computers based on the Skulltrail platform also require high-output power supplies for both the CPU and graphics cards, along with a
Intel's Skulltrail D5400XS motherboard was made with two
References
This article needs additional citations for verification. (March 2008) |
- ^ Kinky Luxury: Intel Skulltrail Platform Review Archived 2008-05-03 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Intel Skulltrail Unleashed: Core 2 Extreme QX9775 × 2
- ^ "Intel Skulltrail Preview". Archived from the original on 2008-05-27. Retrieved 2008-05-17.
- ^ "Legit Reviews - Technology News & Reviews".
- ^ Intel Processors and Boards Compatibility Tool
External links
- Gavrichenkov, Ilya (2008-02-22). "Kinky Luxury: Intel Skulltrail Platform Review". X-bit labs. Archived from the original on 2008-02-26. Retrieved 2008-02-22.
- Shrout, Ryan (2008-02-04). "Full Skulltrail performance revealed: media, gaming". PC Perspective. Retrieved 2008-02-04.
- Hodgin, Rick (2007-10-31). "Intel's Skulltrail enthusiast platform running at 5.0 GHz". TG Daily. Archived from the original on 2007-11-02. Retrieved 2007-11-01.
- Valich, Theo (2008-04-18). "Overclockers Push 8-core Skulltrail To 6 GHz: Dual-socket Overclocking Confirmed". Tom's Hardware. Retrieved 2009-01-13.
- Williams, Rob (2008-02-20). "Building an Affordable Skulltrail System". Techgage. Retrieved 2008-09-06.