Intel Skulltrail with SLI and Crossfire Support

[musek]

^I'm a reseller and sold dozens rigs with Intel CPUs last year. ~70% of them use Intel stock coolers. All were put together by me or my cousin and NONE of them broke.

 

[btarunr]

^The stock-coolers you get with Core 2 processors are the same ones Intel made for the Prescott....they're efficient, good enough for a 15% overclock too.

 

[Wile E]

^The stock-coolers you get with Core 2 processors are the same ones Intel made for the Prescott....they're efficient, good enough for a 15% overclock too.

I have a 33% OC on mine.

 

[btarunr]

^You're special. Not everyone can juice out an orange like you can. I guess you undervolt. Most first-time OC'ers just fool-around with the FSB and heat things up....that's why the 15%

 

[Wile E]

^You're special. Not everyone can juice out an orange like you can. I guess you undervolt. Most first-time OC'ers just fool-around with the FSB and heat things up....that's why the 15%

1.3V for 3.2GHz. Not too bad. Haven't tried lower yet tho.

 

[TechnicalFreak]

Damn.. Now I know what I want for birthday!

 

[Deleted member 3]

eek! FB-DIMM. None of the memory vendors make DDR3 FB-DIMMs, do they?

They don't even exist. Nor would it be useful.

 

[Morgoth]

Nice and Juicy!

I Wonder what happened whit the RAMs!

Yepp 0 in there!

Hmm! Imagine 2xQuad Core's in there! Probably with HT-technology! (if intel goes serious and put some guads with HT on the market)
That Would be 16 Little Horse's in there!
guess I could run a PS3 emulator and a XBOX360 emulator side by side on it!

Yesss!!! I want stuff like this!!!
ps: And a win in Lottery too!!! For fueling all that!

wait til end 2008 then you have Nehalem processor the have MTT (HT)
Bloomfield wil have 4 cores with HT
there is also gona be a dual core version and a octo core (server cpu )

 

[btarunr]

Which memory does the Skulltrail use? DDR2 Fully-Buffered? Got that doubt because the Bonetrail board uses DDR3 UB. The Intel X48 so far looks suspiciously similar to the 5400.

 

[snuif09]

any one knows price yet

 

[x2mA mPn]

this board is EATX form factor correct?

 

[btarunr]

Yes, E-ATX. It's a workstation board trying hard to look extreme-desktop.

 

[Disparia]

It's all just speculation until release... but here's what's been said so far:

Intel's slide doesn't indicate D5400XS pricing, but with the QX9775 expected to cost $1499 and the board taking pricey 800MHz FB-DIMM server memory - up to 8GB of it - complete systems are going to cost a pretty penny.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/10/16/intel_skulltrail_gets_quad_sli/

Intel has not licensed SLI technology from NVIDIA. Intel purchased NVIDIA nForce 100 MCPs to enable support for SLI.

http://www.hothardware.com/News/Intel_X38_Supports_SLI__Sort_Of/

Make sense... nVidia makes everything but 2P (and greater) Intel chipsets. Might as well sell more video cards, otherwise everyone would buy 3-4 AMD cards for this setup.

The other rumors are that the motherboard is not going to be sold with chips other than the QX9775. So no buying cheaper chips and overclocking.

 

[Disparia]

If CrossFire support funnels down from SkullTrail to all 5400 boards, here's the three 1600Mhz FSB/800Mhz FB-DIMM boards that I know of:

Asus DSEB-DG, Tyan Tempest i5400PW, and Supermicro X7DWA-N.

Gigabyte doesn't seem to have one yet, and Iwill has long since folded.

The catch is that even though you'll get to choose cheaper Xeons, there's basically no overclocking. Maybe some hard mods will be available.

 

[btarunr]

^You can't use Yorkfield on either of those boards. Neither of those boards support any multi-GPU technology, neither of those boards come with any OC'ing options. The Intel 5400 and Intel X48 look similar by specs though.

 

[Easy Rhino]

why call it 'skulltrail?' does it leave a trail of skulls in its wake? or do you have to follow a skull trail to get it?

 

[Deleted member 3]

If CrossFire support funnels down from SkullTrail to all 5400 boards, here's the three 1600Mhz FSB/800Mhz FB-DIMM boards that I know of:

Asus DSEB-DG, Tyan Tempest i5400PW, and Supermicro X7DWA-N.

Gigabyte doesn't seem to have one yet, and Iwill has long since folded.

The catch is that even though you'll get to choose cheaper Xeons, there's basically no overclocking. Maybe some hard mods will be available.

The 3 you know of? Just look at the SuperMicro/Tyan/Intel/Asus/etc sites and you'll find they all have a whole lineup.
Far from all have the two requires PEG slots though, obviously many of them are server boards.

As for overclocking, the current options are BSEL pinmods, Systool (actually I heard it works on the X7DWA-N, didn't require W1z to add support) and you can change voltage via various mods. With the i5000 series you could already get a near 50% overclock. i5400 should increase this some more with the added 400MHz strap. The chips are in no way the limiting factor.

 

[imperialreign]

1.3V for 3.2GHz. Not too bad. Haven't tried lower yet tho

I wish I could go that route with my P4, but this damn CPU loves it's voltage



so, it looks like this chipset will only be on workstation boards, hemm?

 

[TheGuruStud]

I think the video performance in SLI/xfire will be abysmal. Since when have the drivers ever worked worth a crap on an inhell

 

[imperialreign]

I've had a lot of success with my crossfire setup on an i975X chipset . . . I couldn't imagine how things would go on a xFire/SLI chipset, though

 

[btarunr]

On the Intel Skulltrail, the Crossfire is handled by the X48 + ICH9R chipset. The slots are commony routed to an NForce 100 chipset (on the board) that handles the SLI operations. So when doing SLI, you'll be using NVidia drivers. When with Crossfire, you'll use the Intel drivers and so far, Intel chipsets have handled Crossfire very well.

 

[Morgoth]

Some one having lack of ram?

 

[btarunr]

^You can fill in 64GB of memory, Just assign 4GB as the main available memory, create a 60GB RAMdrive. Set your startup config to copy your game resources to the RAMdrive from your HDD on each boot, keep a shortcut on your desktop pointing to the game on the RAMdrive. Play it from there and there will be close to no loading time whatsoever

 

[ShadowFold]

So whats the power consumption like?
Tri-sli or 2 Ultra's or 2 9800GX2's or 4 HD3850/70
Phys-x card
2 Quad cores at 4Ghz
Case lighting and all
Every day's gonna be a living hell for the PSU.

Two QX9550, 8800ULTRA SLi, 4 DDR3 sticks only equal to about 550w on the psu calculater. That doesnt sound right tho

 

[Tatty_Two]

^^Basically Nvidia looks only for profit.

Lol and noone else does