Skulltrail

For the CeBIT show we had on Cooler Master’s behalf at the CeBIT, we decided to set up a Skulltrail system. Skull…what ? Skulltrail ! That’s the codename for the newest Intel delirium. Let’s consider a few specs:

• A workstation mainboard using the 5400 chipset,with four PCI-Ex 16x slots supporting both Crossfire and SLI, four FB-DIMM slots (yes, that’s server memory), and of course, two LGA771 sockets for the CPUs. Note that even though they’re LGA771 for the sockets, the mounting holes for the cooling solution are LGA775 style, allowing to use any common Core2 heatsink, good idea from the Intel designers. Last but not least, a BIOS which boasts almost every usual overclocking setting, except for FSB:RAM ratio. The board complies with the E-ATX form factor, meaning it won’t fit any case. and you’d better have a top notch power supply, because it requires a 24 pin plus two 8 pins connectors (one for each CPU). Overall design is good, and looks to be the fruit of a good brainstorming to fit all that stuff on a single PCB, especially for the VRMs, made for high loads, even the memory one. (We’ll see later how to mod them !)
• Special CPUs, called X9775. They’re Core2 based Xeons, with fully unlocked multipliers, factory setting is 8×400 = 3.2GHz. So that’s the latest generation of Intel processors, 45nm, FSB 1600 and for sure, quad cores. Throw a pair on the mainboard, and that makes a octo-core home system !
• Memory: that’s the bad point of the system, you’re forced to use FB-DIMM. It’s DDR2 based, but with ECC, and a completely different way to address it from the chipset (won’t enter into the details). It’s not that expensive, less than DDR3, but slow, and there’s no sticks available rated over DDR2-800, combine that with the automatic ratio selection, and you have a rather bad memory sub-system for overclocking.

Now the presentation is over, we can go further on funny things… let’s clock that stuff! Good news, it overclocks just like a “common” QX9770, meaning I can reach around 4.5GHz on aircooling, at the CeBIT, we went up to 5.26GHz using liquid nitrogen (limited by poor memory which wouldn’t overclock any further). At these speeds, it runs really fast, best way to test it is to run some Cinebench, 9.5 version takes as low as 5 seconds to complete… my good old quadcore took 12!

We didn’t have that much time to run every bench we wanted, but new tests are scheduled for next weeks.

For those interested, we couldn’t find any published volt mod for this board, so we created one. it allows up to ~1.77V for the CPUs, higher values make the board really overheating, and you don’t want to try, trust me. (I got my finger burnt holding it). Following pictures show the mod for one CPU VRM, but it is exactly the same for the other processor, and it’s easy to copy it. Voltage regulation is based on an ADP3189 chip, so you want to solder a 10K VR between the resistor shown on the picture and the ground.

More pictures and benchmark results will come quickly, but here are a few, and they can be used as a reference for the volt mod.

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