Skulltrail @ XS

[Drwho?]

Dear Lord, don't say Koolance on this forum or the water cooling guys will have heart failure!
As to the 443x4 figure,is that max the board will handle or the point of diminishing returns?
Thanks.

LOL ... I meant, the Cool Lance ... you know, the guy who won few time the "tour de france" , lol ...


yes, the circuits of the board saturate for my board at 443MHz, we are working on tuning this. just keep it mind, the FSBs are running faster than the Pentiun 4 at launch ...

Francois

[Movieman]

LOL ... I meant, the Cool Lance ... you know, the guy who won few time the "tour de france" , lol ...


yes, the circuits of the board saturate for my board at 443MHz, we are working on tuning this. just keep it mind, the FSBs are running faster than the Pentiun 4 at launch ...

Francois

Thanks for the info.
I know these guys and they will be punching 2.3V through the FBDimms looking for DDR2-1000...IF the board can handle it.

Good recovery with the "Cool Lance"!

[saaya]

Dear Lord, don't say Koolance on this forum or the water cooling guys will have heart failure!

why? are their watercooling kits really THAT bad?

[Movieman]

why? are their watercooling kits really THAT bad?

A mix of aluminum and copper..a mistake,one or the other but not a mix of the two metals..

[alfaunits]

Thanks for the info.
I know these guys and they will be punching 2.3V through the FBDimms looking for DDR2-1000...IF the board can handle it.

How do ya know it's the board rather than FBDIMM overheating? (honest question)

P.S. FUGGER, did you try disabling Snoop Filter yet?

[Movieman]

How do ya know it's the board rather than FBDIMM overheating? (honest question)

P.S. FUGGER, did you try disabling Snoop Filter yet?

I don't think it's an overheating issue as much as a board limitation like we saw with the 5100X chipset boards..

[Zytek_Fan]

I beleive that Newegg runs a bot on site that will up and down the prices based on page hits. IE:Customer interest in a product.

Just a thought but if you build a high end Harpertown you might have more computational power than the whole state of Idaho combined! J/K

No, I'll just have the most powerful PC in my city

edit: Actually it probably will be the most powerful desktop PC in Idaho, unless someone else has SkullTrail here...

[saaya]

A mix of aluminum and copper..a mistake,one or the other but not a mix of the two metals..

hmmm i have a kit here... oh yeah... your right, the radiator is alu inside... thats not good :S
EDIT: all the copper parts are gold coated... so there shouldnt be any galvanic corrosion right?

[STEvil]

Yeah, gold and aluminum are dissimilar metals!!!

[RottenMutt]

i didn't know Idaho had indoor plumbing!

as far as purchasing that second cpu later is that you will have a difficult time finding a matching stepping cpu (fleabay).

[Zytek_Fan]

Yeah, gold and aluminum are dissimilar metals!!!

Wouldn't nickel plated blocks be alright?

i didn't know Idaho had indoor plumbing!

as far as purchasing that second cpu later is that you will have a difficult time finding a matching stepping cpu (fleabay).

Okay guys

[Movieman]

i didn't know Idaho had indoor plumbing!

as far as purchasing that second cpu later is that you will have a difficult time finding a matching stepping cpu (fleabay).

Of course they do!
My heavens man, how do you think they wash all those potatoes!

My apologies, I am trying to keep this on topic but some things you just can't pass up!

I agree on the cpu but is stepping match that important anymore?
I run a B1 and a B3 clover together and they play nicely together.
No fights or squables..

[Zytek_Fan]

Of course they do!
My heavens man, how do you think they wash all those potatoes!

My apologies, I am trying to keep this on topic but some things you just can't pass up!

I agree on the cpu but is stepping match that important anymore?
I run a B1 and a B3 clover together and they play nicely together.
No fights or squables..

What do you think there's dams on the Snake River for?

[STEvil]

Wouldn't nickel plated blocks be alright?



Okay guys

Better, still not perfect.

Its best to go all aluminum or all copper and just not worry.

[Zytek_Fan]

Better, still not perfect.

Its best to go all aluminum or all copper and just not worry.

Yep

[starla-mc]

Justs saw that intel have added the skilltrail to there website.

http://www.intel.com/products/motherboard/D5400XS/index.htm

Warning spare pants maybe needed

[alfaunits]

Weee, it says regular Xeons are supported (though the specific Processor support page doesn't say so
This is funny however:
"Support for ECC and non-ECC memory "
Put DDR2 there

[Donnie27]

Weee, it says regular Xeons are supported (though the specific Processor support page doesn't say so
This is funny however:
"Support for ECC and non-ECC memory "
Put DDR2 there

This is even better.

Support for 45nm Intel® Core™2 Extreme processors in an LGA771 socket with a 1600 MHz system bus

Support for both 45nm & 65nm Intel® Xeon® processors in an LGA771 socket with a 1600, 1333, or 1066 MHz system bus

[Drwho?]

Just a little brainstorming and update here, for US President day:

We are adding the more memory timing tunning parameters in the bios, as so many of you did request it.

The board will be available very soon for purchase, we are done with all the hardware part

If you have access to the GDC , you can all stop by Intel area, I will be there, and will be happy to answer any questions. Use the pass code "xtremesystems" to get to me. I will have the main board designer with me, if you have VR questions, or any other interesting request, our hears will be wild open.

I am now working on planning Skulltrail II hehehe!!! This time, NO FB-DIMMS ... but if you have ideas, email them to my1stname.myfamillyname@intel.com

Many people think that Dual channel DDRIII or DDRII would have been enough for Skulltrail. I want to give some rational on this:

With 8 cores, you get much more MEM requests than with 2 or 4, and those are usually "stream" request. the "today" DDRII/III memory controlleurs are not really design for some many ways, and with 8 Cores, most of them will have to break streams more than 50% of the time, as soon as you get memory intensite. So, taking the actual single processor chipset and add shared FSB would have been slower, only Jounalist could have come up with this idea ... (Kidding)
The naive person will compare the DDRII or III to the FB-DIMM and will concluse that you could beat it, and this conclusion would be totally wrong.
If you want to feed 8 cores properly, or 8 threads, you need a memory controler design from the ground up, allowing read and write at the same time. You need more "ways", and you need to fast forward from core to core faster. Uniform memory is much harder to archive than NUMA, NUMA is the easy way. As you probably saw on the 4x4, NUMA slow down compare to most of the desktop boards, when it gets to games, and not only by few %, but by more than 15% (On UT 3)
When the 8 cores are requesting data on the 2 FSB of Skulltrail, the S5400 does a much better job and any DDRII subsystem from any brand. who ever tell you the opposite need to talk to me, I did a lot of research on this, and I could never beat the S5400 on simulation.
Now, think about it, if it was that easy to use a DDRII/III controler, it would have been pure profite for my platform, in terms of $(X48 is cheaper than S5400), so, if the performance could have been there, I would have done it.

And for the journalist that think they know better than us, well, come and spend a month with me, with the sim tools, and you ll understand that when a platform stack up more than 1.7 Billion transistors, life and tech choice are more than educated choice, we don t decide to do a platform only with the chips we have, we always check to make sure it will be the best we can produce. I am shock about few journalist writing thinks like "just an other 8 cores machine", look at the complexity of this machine, and ask yourself why other people cancelled it, if it was that easy, they would have done it.

so, now, a lot of people asked me: "Why Skulltrail?"
My answer is simple: "Because we can and because few wants it"

I never saw anybody going after " Aérospatiale" for doing the concorde, or Ferrari for doing the Enzo ... but I saw some article where people did not understand ... measuring power on SKT, or trying to compare the platform without doing the tuning and clocking required ... for those web site, I just now know that they are disconnected from the industry they try to comment about, they lost the passion. The most rational buy for a car is a NEON from Dodge, or something like this, but if you can have the BMW M5, what do you take ... this is what the "big web site" are forgetting, they became un emotional, and so, bad advisor for their readers. The same journalists that accused us of having no creativity shoot on a new creation! Duh!

Best regards to all, If you want more crazy hardware, I need your support! I want to keep the Dialog open!

Who? alias Francois Piednoel

[Movieman]

You don't have to convince most people here..
Just a few diehard fanboys looking for something to complain about.
I've worked with a dual clover since Dec 2006 and know what these systems can do.
Yes, there is a heat issue with the FBDimms but it's controllable with a darned $9.00 bracket and fan.
The FBDimms may not clock to the ungodly speeds of the top DDR2 or 3 but they do the job and do it nicely.
When people stop trying to compare this to a single socket pure gamer and open their eyes to what it can do "across the board" then your sales will go crazy.

[Charles Wirth]

Thanks for the heads up on whats to come.

[T_M]

Francois, it is so refreshing to hear someone in the industry actually speak out about the rubbish that many review sites come up with, especially at the enthusiast/extreme level.

[Zytek_Fan]

Francois, it is so refreshing to hear someone in the inductry actually speak out about the rubbish that many review sites come up with, especially at the enthusiast/extreme level.

I don't know why so many review sites are so critical of enthusiast products. It's not like they're reviewing a mid-end or value segment product that they must explain EVERYTHING about.

Guru3D always impresses me with the quality of their reviews and this is a perfect example:
http://www.guru3d.com/article/skulltrail_review/495/15/

The conclusion doesn't mention anything "bad", just some noteworthy things to keep in mind.

[Cronos]

I'd say just give us dual Nehalem.
I want Intel's superior floating point performance combined with AMD's superior (and adequate) memory performance in one package. Until then, I'll stick with desktop stuff, clustering it if required.

[Zytek_Fan]

I'd say just give us dual Nehalem.
I want Intel's superior floating point performance combined with AMD's superior (and adequate) memory performance in one package. Until then, I'll stick with desktop stuff, clustering it if required.

That's already in the works