Intel has really spaced themselves with the over-clockable and a performance rigged motherboard for over the years, with just media and entry level boards to play with in the past years. But with the AMD counterparts are pushing thought to their AMD7 series (on the previous review) for a more gaming competition hold with Intel, well this year, Intel made great chipset range of media and also gaming series of motherboards, called the extreme series. More of a reason of including it with their Intel Core 2 Duo extreme series, but for the top and serious gamers in mind with the Skulltrail series was a right choice for Intel.
The D5400XS
The Intel Skulltrail motherboard is in the basics of a standard EATX with the same physical characteristics of the server motherboard, most noticeably the two LGA 771 sockets that connect dual server Intel Zeon and the latest Intel core 2 Quad extreme Q9775. With the dual DIMM DDR2 and 3 memory that 16GBs limit, which, is useless because most basic 32bit OS systems only utilize only 3.25Gbs. Any other one are that it can, and the only motherboard series, that can not only crossfire, but also SLI. Good board for those people that can switch quickly to either NVIDIA or ATI video cards with multi-GPU utilization; the others are six SATA 3.0Gbs, one IDE connector and ten USB connectors.
In Intel they normally sell their blue-print of their motherboards to third-party manufacturers like Gigabyte or ASUS, to mass produce it in china and sell it to us. But now with the Intel Skulltrail, their best of the best of motherboards made by Intel can only made by Intel, which means these things are rare, and can only find in famous computer stores like tiger direct or, in rare cases, in the pro-Intel stores.
The test results
The test, the Intel Skulltrail, it more that in pleases me more that the D5400SX has a reasonable score on the SISoftsandra for a server type computer, just beating the highest one that is in the database of the software, in both memory latency and arithmetic utilization, while I viewed on the 790FX scores, it beats the Intel Skulltrail on just memory, with the same corsair, but the rest is below average to the Skulltrail, with the advantage of eight (4X2) cores it can hold, flies on the CPU utilization test with the games department, on SLI reach a higher frame rate than crossfire, reasons may be that ATI is now AMD owned.
Conclusion
For this board really works with the server type, standalone system, more of and issue that the Skulltrail consumes more power from their current products of P35’s and X38 boards, also for the form factor and also budget on other stuff as well.