Inside Skulltrail
The Skulltrail platform consists of the D5400XS motherboard based on Intel's 5400 chipset, mainly designed for server and high-end workstation configurations. It sports two LGA 771 CPU sockets, which can accept a variety of Intel Xeon CPUs.
The Intel D5400XS Motherboard -- aka "Skulltrail"
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However, Skulltrail differs from most Intel workstation and server boards in a couple of key ways. First, two Nvidia Nforce 100 bridge chips live between Intel's memory controller hub and the four PCIe X16 graphics slots. This is how an Intel motherboard supports two Nvidia GPUs running in SLI mode. Note that this actually limits Skulltrail to just two-way SLI, not the more recent triple SLI supported in the latest Nvidia chipset based motherboards.
Intel has commented that Skulltrail can actually handle four graphics cards, particularly if the user is looking to support multiple displays. In fact, Intel has set up a Skulltrail system in their labs with two Nvidia cards running SLI and two ATI cards in CrossFire. Alas, games tend to get confused, so this isn't really a workable solution for most users.
Skulltrail Block Diagram
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As with other Intel server boards, Skulltrail uses FB-DIMMs (fully buffered DIMMs.) The current state of the art for FB-DIMMs is DDR2-800, which limits memory bandwidth compared to the latest DDR3 and even high speed DDR2 enthusiast memory. Also affecting memory performance is the additional error checking built into FB-DIMMs—certainly useful for mission critical servers, but perhaps less so for high end gaming systems.
Micron 800MHz FB-DIMM samples
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Of course, any enthusiast board worth its salt would have a lot of I/O, and Skulltrail doesn't disappoint.
Skulltrail ATX I/O
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The D5400XS offers 7.1 channel analog audio, plus a digital optical audio output port. Six USB ports, gigabit Ethernet, a FireWire connector, and two eSATA ports round out the connectors. However, there are no legacy I/O ports on the board. While there is a legacy parallel ATA port on the board itself, there is no legacy floppy disc connector.
Intel shipped us a board with a pair of Core 2 Extreme QX9775 CPUs, which plug into the LGA 771 sockets. The QX9775 clocks at 3.2GHz, and uses a 400MHz quad pumped FSB clock (1600MHz effective). In reality, the QX9775 is a Xeon variant, due to its use of the 771-pin socket. It's also quite power hungry—Intel rates the QX9775 at 150W TDP!
Now that we've seen the platform, let's take a look at benchmarks and performance. Continued...
