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The Intel Skulltrail Platform (or, Crysis at 100 Frames Per Second, Kinda)
Veegeezee
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
What do you get when you cross ridiculously spendthrift, elitist PC enthusiasts and a polarized gaming market with a highly competitive microprocessor industry?
tadaaa!
HardOCP test runs a system with eight cores at 3.2 GHz, a pair of 8800GTX's, 4 gigs of ram and a one-effing-kilowatt power supply. It actually draws nearly six hundred watts under load, and it runs Crysis at 107 frames per second. It might cost you an embarrassing six grand, but who needs food or rent when you can boast an octo-core desktop that's worth three times the per-capita GDP of Zimbabwe.
Bask, peasant.
tadaaa!
HardOCP wrote:By Intel’s definition Skulltrail includes the D5400XS motherboard and two QX9775 LGA771 processors. The rest is up to the buyer. In reality it is essentially a dual processor quad core system targeted toward the ultra high end PC enthusiast. This includes gamers and professionals needing 8 cores for either multi-tasking or higher end applications that can leverage the performance offered by the platform. It is expensive, it is huge, and the requirements for the overall platform are staggering.
HardOCP test runs a system with eight cores at 3.2 GHz, a pair of 8800GTX's, 4 gigs of ram and a one-effing-kilowatt power supply. It actually draws nearly six hundred watts under load, and it runs Crysis at 107 frames per second. It might cost you an embarrassing six grand, but who needs food or rent when you can boast an octo-core desktop that's worth three times the per-capita GDP of Zimbabwe.
Bask, peasant.
Veegeezee on
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Bet that thing generates a nice electric bill.
on the plus side, it'll also double as a small space heater, so your gas bill will go down
Doesnt' mean I don't want it though.
That's about what the "regular" high end quads are getting. Anyway, another crazy thing about this board is that it supports both SLi and Crossfire
There is no technical reason why any board with multiple PCI-E x16 slots should not do this. I guess Intel just finally worked out the licensing angle.
It's basically a useless platform except for rendering - the only area where any increase of worth (over a single quad core system) is noted
it's a stupid hunk of crap
Not really. it's actualy a system that will get better with age, instead of worse. as more apps/games are written to take advantage of more and more threads, this system will only get faster.
Yes, right now it's not much better than a standard dual/quad core system, but give it a year.
Dude, it's just like AMD 4x4. By the time anything is actually taking advantage of it, you'd be able to buy a system that's just as powerful for a quarter of the price.
And for god's sake why did they make it use FB-DIMMs? Fucking hell, Intel, FB-DIMM is the worst shit since Rambus.
It's already been said, but no, you're wrong.
With age it'll just get closer to death - which is less than a year out at this point - when octo core processors are released.
Then this thing will be obsolete. There will never be a time when it "shines" - at least for gamers
mechanic? More like evil genius laboratory. FBDIMM's?
Workings of a madman.
There really isn't any reason for most consumers to need this board. It seems like a crossbreed of a server board with an enthusiast board. Neat? ya. sure. Out of my price range? most certainly. Especially since driving that high of resolution would need a special monitor in the first place.
This sob(son of a board) better ship with an X48 chipset instead though.
*Edit*
Oh and running Supreme commander in 2560X1600 with 8xAA is fucking insane.
FOUR CORES!
but wait, I have a ridiculous amount of money left over!
EIGHT CORES!
Which is, of course, exactly how AMD made headway against the Pentium 4 back in the day. Once we start to see some stuff really take advantage of four cores, I'm gonna be sold on a Phenom. Sure, it's not quite as good, but it's cheap.
My sympathy for the fucktards that lug it to LAN parties.
"Here's $40 for running my machine at your house for two days. If it costs anymore, let me know."
It's the Ferarri Enzo of computers. It's absurdly expensive, ridiculously impractical, stupidly inefficient, and they couldn't sell more than 300 or so worldwide if they tried, which they won't.
But hey, it's got its niche, I suppose.
I just want to see this "SLI and Crossfire both, without hacked drivers" stuff trickle down to normal people systems.
Well, not really. It's only because there's an nForce Northbridge on it.
nVidia is still playing the [Stewie]"It's mine, all mine!"[/Stewie] card and not letting anyone outside of their nForce license have a whack at SLi.
Unless you disable what I understand to be essentially a "if (MotherboardChipset == nForce)" check in their driver, that is. Of course, post a set of hacked drivers on a website and nVidia's squad of trained attack lawyers will break into your house and shove your graphics cards up your ass.
Ugh. God damn the industry sickens me sometimes.
Supposedly, nVidia recently said that in reality there is some special sauce that's actually implemented into the nForce chipset that lets SLi do it's thing (Something about timings and latency implementations). But mostly everyone agrees that's just market speak covering the fact that nVidia's major selling point is SLi.
There is no special sauce reason they can't do it. PCI-E can do multiple GPU's on it's own. What nivdia did is force the driver to only allow it over nforce chipsets. This can be changed at any point, but given how crappy nforce 680i is compared to intels offerings it would kill their mobo sales completely.
Also nvidia has sued people that tried to push hacked drivers, you can currently run geforce 7 SLI over a 975x platfrom, but no driver updates.
Intel got around this with skulltrail by using two nvidia MCP's, however it can't do tripple/quad SLI, and since it's a 5400 chipset with FB-DIMM's, it get's it's ass handed to it in gaming by conventional 680i/780i SLI gaming boxes.
Because ATi aren't asshats and realize that any crossfire config sold is an extra card. They even sanctioned asus/hp to cook up an nforce BIOS to run crossfire on the blackbird.
Not really. If I wanted to be stuck with a dual GPU workstation with FB-DIMMS, well guess what! They already make it! Nothing has been stopping you from running SLI on a workstation board with xeons all this time.
The selling point of this was 1. overclocking (as we've seen it's not up to par GG FB-DIMMS and NB), and 2. quad SLI (won't happen nvidia has locked it out of the MCP's used on it).
So there goes the only things that make it "better" then competing 5400 boards. And it lacks PCI-X, integrated SCSI or SAS. Now really, if you are going to spend that kind of cash on a board + CPU + GPU you aren't going to skimp on your HDD configuration.
You're kinda stuck with them here. Having owned dual xeon boards OC'ing is a pain in the ass, you're stuck with BSEL mods and other suck idiocy.
On this board, even though it supports OC FB-DIMM kills that, so you need the unlocked MP that only comes with EE chips.
The only real people I've seen interested in this are LN2 oc'ers that play the game "break a benchmark"
However, judging from past SLI performance, you don't see any benefit whatsoever past the second card anyway, so who gives a fuck?
sure you do
but not across the board, and not nearly enough to justify the expense