xpress gate ting BAD!!
lol... i like dis ....Intel overshadowing AMD with only ah new Chipset release!! i might get cuss out from AMD users i sure
Skulltrail doesn't FASN8, it does obliterateIDF Fall 007 Seaburg, iceberg, we're all borgedBy Nebojsa Novakovic: Tuesday 18 September 2007, 22:56TOWARDS THE END of Kicking Pat's keynote, he showed a spread of new 45nm Penryn platforms, including the anticipated Skulltrail. The second generation V8 platform has two - unlocked supposedly - HarpertownDP chips similar to the ones in our, um, delayed review this morning.Couple it with "optimised" - read streamline latency and bandwidth at the expense of some RAS features - Seaburg chipset, four OC FB-DIMM sockets (one module per channel) with T1 command rate, and top-notch VRM and board cooling. Then add cascaded dual phase-change - 80 degrees C freeze cooling, we're talking about a potential 5+ GHz, eight-core monster with dual FSB2000+ and (I assume liquid-cooled too) quad-channel DDR2-1000+ CL4 FB-DIMMs. Oh boy...There are four PCI-E x16 v1 GPU slots on board, created by expanding the 32 PCI-E x16 v2 lanes of Seaburg chipset using twin PCI-E v2->v1 bridges into 64 PCI-E x16 v1 lanes, i.e. four slots. This would give you Quad CrossFire or Quad SLI capability at pretty much full GPU I/O speed, since most near-future GPUs are more than happy with the 16-lane wide PCI-E per GPU.Intel's man behing the SkullTrail (and the famed Bad Axe D975XBX2 board), the ex-Alienware Eric Cubbage, also showed a bunch of early "Skulltrail friends", among the pioneers to do a part of the first sales units of the new platform from December onwards. These included the UK-based SCAN Computers and the high-end cooling from the very local Vigor Gaming from nearby City of Industry, CA.Oh boy, how bad it is that there is no AMD FASN8 anytime soon now, at least we could have something to compare the Skulltrail to. µ
Intel Skulltrail supports SLI, Quad SLIIDF Fall 007 When Nvidia fixes its multi-GPU techBy Theo Valich in San Francisco: Wednesday 19 September 2007, 00:01DURING COMPUTEX in June of this year, we were involved in a war of words with Nvidia when it came to Intel chipsets and SLI support. Nvidia's Head PR claimed that no SLI is in the works for Intel, our own Charlie claimed otherwise.At this year's IDF, Steve Smith of Intel fame explained that Skulltrail is sporting support for dual, and even Quad graphics when Nvidia decides to work on the support of four graphics cards at the same time.The motherboard shown below is the key part of Intel's gaming attack coming in late Q4 or perhaps Q1'08, if it slips during debug phase.First real V8 motherboard for enthusiasts and professionals alike sport support for four graphics cards at the same timeYou can see that this is not your server board model from the first generation of Intel's V8, but rather a true enthusiast motherboard with a nice amount of PCIe 2.0 slots for graphics cards. Sadly, it is based on first generation server chipset named Stoakley, so it supports only FB-DIMMs. However, other options speak alot to high-end enthusiasts, regardless of being from gaming or professional side of things.
"yawn, I have E6600 with 8800gtx and board with 4PCIe x16 slots.... life sucks"
Intel shows off SkulltrailIDF Fall 007 It officially exists, and is officially fastBy Charlie Demerjian in San Francisco: Friday 21 September 2007, 11:31INTEL FINALLY UNVEILED Skulltrail, and it looks to be a winner. When the company first rolled out the original answer to AMD's 4x4 called V8, we were a tad skeptical. I am glad to say that when it comes out a year later, it will be a much better beast.What is Skulltrail? It is simply a massively massaged Stoakley server board with most of the mods directly affecting gamers. You take a 2S Harpertown system, put in dual Nvidia PCIe chips to allow for 4 true 16x slots, and cut the number of FBD slots from 16 to 4.Skulltrail machineIt doesn't take a genius to figure out that a dual Harpertown with four GPUs is going to be a monster for gaming. AMD had a potential contender with FASN8, but since it foolishly killed it, Intel is going to own the gaming crown in 2008 no matter what AMD does.How well does it do? With stock frequencies of 3.40GHz, 1600MHz FSB, dual 8800GTXs and 2 x 2GB Micron FBD-800 sticks, it hit 17006 on 3DMark06. It also scored a bit better than 20K on Cinebench, 21521 to be exact. I wonder where I have seen that before?There is a lot of tweaking left to be done on this box, but it should be out in a few months, end of the year or early next. By that time, with more memory and four GPUs, well, it is going to be unmatched in performance. Intel had an early version running at 4.0GHz, more is sure to come in short order as the platform matures.Skulltrail at 4GHzWhat more is there to say? When we criticized Intel, the lads did the work and came back with what looks like a winner. AMD knifed the competition leaving Intel the uncontested victory in the gaming space. It is no longer a contest, Intel wins this round. µ
I doh care what Prowl claim, his system will BOW before skulltrail
Intel's Skulltrail sports HyperTransport linksAfter all the talk, QuadSLI and SLI uses HT-connected chipsBy Theo Valich: Wednesday, 26 September 2007, 5:00 PMClick here to find out more!NVIDIA IS REALLY happy with Skulltrail, or at least its chipset sales people are. Since Intel wanted SLI and, later, Quad SLI, the almighty Chipzilla had no choice but to bow to the current hotshot here. This bowing includes including two Nvidia chips on the Skulltrail motherboard.These chips are no less than the fully-fledged Media Communications Processors (MCP) that were already used in previous Nvidia chipsets, like the 680i and 590, but with all of the chipset functionality disabled. The chips sit on the motherboard and do nothing but enable SLI and QuadSLI. So Skulltrail will not sport Nvidia's cool dual GbE controllers (or even Quad GbE, in this case), nor RAID5 features from Nvidia. All of the SouthBridge functionality remain with Intel's own chip.The MCP chips communicate with each other through the HyperTransport interface, and serve as a quite good layout trial for Quick Path (FMACSI - Formerly Known As Common System Interface), the bi-directional interface of the future for Intel's Nehalem generation, since the company does not have a lot of experience outside GTL+ FSB (Front Side Bus) world. For communications between the MCPs and Intel's own chipset, the PCIe 2.0 interface is used.We're not all that too sure what waves this will make in the world of latencies. We have seen on results of Nvidia's previous attempt - AMD's 4x4/QuadFX/FASN8 project for Athlon 64 FX/Agena FX series. That project had issues with latency between just two graphics cards, since the GPUs chips were not directly connected to the chipset, but rather to two different chips (680a chipset).It will be interesting to see what will happen with SLI and QuadSLI performance-wise when the graphics cards are connected with the CPU through FSB, through the NorthBridge to the first MCP and then through HyperTransport from first to second MCP. µ
The good folks over at ASUS have sent over the P5E3 Deluxe, which is based upon Intel's new X38 Chipset and continues in the usual ASUS fashion of pushing new (and often unexpected) innovations onto the motherboard. Without spoiling the review of this motherboard that will be published shortly, the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe is one of the most innovative motherboards we have seen to date and it packs one very exciting and unusual feature. Embedded onto the P5E3 Deluxe is a Linux environment that features a Firefox-rebranded web browser and the Skype VoIP client! Within five seconds of turning on this $360 USD gaming/enthusiast motherboard, you can be using Linux and surfing the Internet. On this motherboard the feature is known as ASUS Express Gate, which is powered by something called SplashTop. SplashTop is an instant-on Linux desktop being created by DeviceVM. SplashTop isn't even launching for a few more days (October 10), but in this article we have more details on this embedded Linux environment as well as screenshots and our thoughts with what will hopefully come next for this Linux environment.The P5E3 Deluxe is the first ASUS motherboard to feature this Express Gate (SplashTop) technology, and ASUS describes it as: "With a fast boot-up speed of only 5 seconds, the ASUS Express Gate offers an optional Linux OS boot-up that allows you to enjoy instant access to commonly used functions like accessing the Internet, VoIP, and Web emailing without entering the OS." Before cutting to the chase, some of the other features on this motherboard include an ASUS EPU (Energy Processing Unit), ASUS WiFi-AP @n (802.11n wireless), ASUS third generation 8-phase power design, Intel 45nm Core 2 Quad support, and two PCI Express 2.0 slots (ATI CrossFire supportive) powered by the Intel X38 Chipset.
X48 is a horrible ideaHurts everyone for no reasonBy Charlie Demerjian: Tuesday, 20 November 2007, 2:27 AMSIGH. DEEP SIGH. No sooner does AMD buy more shells for its shotgun podiatry vaudeville act than Intel returns to its old ways.That is not, for those new to this game, a compliment.The problem is the X48 chipset, quite possibly the second best chipset not on the market yet.It is a minor, and I mean minor revision to the otherwise excellent X38 chipset. The added 10 merely brings you from a 1333FSB to 1600FSB. It is otherwise the same part, one look at the mobos that have the X38 sticker hastily crossed out and the name X48 written in will tell you that.The problem? In the days of yore, like six months ago for people with memories that long, this would not have rated a name change, or anything else, just a bump in the stepping noted on the technical documents. New boards would have a "now with more vitamins, minerals and FSB" sticker on it, and the world would go on.What do we end up with? A "new" chipset on "new" boards, and ghod help us, fodder for the marketing critters. All this for functionality that was either there from day 1 on X38, or added in the last month, then almost assuredly fused off for 'new vanilla' X38.1 parts not labeled X48.Why did they bother? Is it to milk money out of the high end? Don't they do enough of that already with the EE/XE/whatever chips? Are they trying to make us buy an XE mobo for your XE chip, and woe betide the fool who buys one without the other? Are they going to EOL the X38 after a whopping 39 day lifespan?In the end, we are left with two chips that do exactly the same thing with one bullet point artificially changed. OEMs now must stock multiple SKUs, must have multiple variants of the same mobo, and most likely pay more for the added 266MHz. What a mess.Who pays? In the end, the customer - that would be you and I. For anyone touching this mess, from Intel to little Timmy buying the uber-rig, it only adds headaches, which in turn jack up costs. There was a time, again in the golden days of six plus months ago, when Intel would not do such a thing because it realised it shafts the very consumers who give them the highest margins. Oh how I long for those days.With any luck, Intel will realize that this course of action is not a very bright one, and will backpedal ASAP. If it wants to go back to the bad old monopoly days and jack up prices, fine, it earned it, but just stop playing SKU games that hurt everyone.
