This means that Skulltrail effectively falls into two halves. On the one hand we have the dual Xeons and on the other we have the PCI Express graphics. There’s no denying that eight cores of Xeon power has the potential to be something special, and when we ran software that tests the CPU in isolation the results were staggering. POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 24, DivX 6.8 and iTunes 7.6 all churned through their work at a pace that left us stunned.
POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 24 Results
Times in Seconds
Shorter bars are better
At the standard 3.2GHz clock speed the Skulltrail system demolished POV-Ray in 47 seconds and when we overclocked to 4.0GHz the time dropped to 38 seconds. To put that in context, the V8 system with dual Xeons running at 3.0GHz took 1 minute 11 seconds and a Core 2 Q6600 2.4GHz took 2 minutes 51 seconds.
DivX 6.8 AVI Encoding Results
Times in Seconds
Shorter bars are better
iTunes MP3 Conversion Results
Times in Seconds
Shorter bars are better
COMMENTS
@Ryan Stewart
Yes, the case is mucho important, especially when I have to sit near it the whole day long to earn the money which bought that beast....
@AC
Are you thick?
Dunno if you know this but they are testing out an Alpha motherboard, not some packaged computer. Its a showcase for what Intel might be able to do in the future.
and if you wanted something with the V8 in it you could go Dell for cheaper and better (minus the shiny case, because those are oh-so important when shopping for workstations or servers).
Essentially the Mac Pro?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it would seem that this is more or less the current Mac Pro (1600MHz FSB, DDR2-800 DIMMs, 8800GT, 3GHz SATA connectors, PCI Express 2, dual 3.2GHz quad-core Xeons, etc.) The Mac supports up to 32GB of RAM and has 4 PCIe2 slots, though it doesn't have the eSATA connectors. There are other minor differences of course, but it would seem that it's more or less equivalent. However, I suspect the Mac runs a bit quieter and you get a well-built aluminum case with it for a bit less money. (Aside from that whole UNIX-y OS X thing, which I won't even want to get into :-)
That'll be bad (or is it good?) news for the bank manager then
Finally Intel have pulled their finger out and put together a board that the money-no-object-water-cooled-behemoth-loving-LAN-showoff gamers will no-doubt snap up at the first available opportunity.
It's surprising to see that the 8800GT cards are able to keep pace (in most cases) with the AMD/ATI offerings...
It makes me wonder what the benchmark scores might be were this board paired with 8800GTX or ATI HD3870 cards...?
RE: Brian Miller
that'll change with new games as the programmers become more multithreaded/SLI compatable
