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Before I start typing away for the next 5 to 10 minutes I’d like to say that the Skull Trail motherboards are in fact as fast as the Nvidia 790i chipsets. The skull trail motherboard can take DDR3 with the FSB (Front Side bus) of 1600 MHz with the memory clock to match. Nvidia do support slightly higher memory clock speeds of 1800 MHz and 2000mhz with EPP I’m assuming. The update is free online via a flash BIOS upgrade (I was expecting a new series of motherboards).

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I have been meaning to write some sort of short article on skulltrail. If you are not aware by now what skulltrail is I would consider directing your attention to this post.
Skulltrail is a motherboard for the enthusiast, the board uses Xeon socket ‘771′. The best bit is the motherboard has TWO sockets for extreme clocks. So thinking about it the board can support 8 processors! It is considered the first dual socket motherboard for the desktop market. The FSB runs at 1600mhz but the motherboard uses DDR 2 memory modules running at a top speed of 800mhz not over-clocked.

Intel state that they created the first desktop dual socket motherboard. I remember when AMD had dual socket motherboards using Operton processors years ago. Now how is this any different from Intel? The motherboard is based on the server market with ECC memory and uses the socket 771 for Xeon processors. I’d consider this a server motherboard more than anything else!

Back when AMD released their 64bit architecture it was well known that using two processors with one motherboard had no advantage. Gamers preferred to splash out for higher clocked singular processor set-ups. There was even a debate on the actual performance increase of using SLI/Crossfire. Using SLI/Crossfire found hardly any gains in performance, im beginning to see a pattern emerging! Now that Nvidia have released their Nvidia 790i Chipset I would like to see what the performance differences actually are in the current gaming market. I guess some research is to be considered: P.

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I’ve been waiting sometime now for the appearance of Nvidia’s latest Chipset based on the socket 775. I have seen Intel with their crossfire and Sli x3 configurations running at PCI-E 2.0. I was also interested to see non existent DDR3 module support for quad core processors. The only implementation before today was the x48. Nvidia’s competition was their older version of the 790i which had DDR2 and a 3-way SLI configuration not to mention the lack of 45nm support. Obviously Nvidia had to fight back.

The new Nvidia 790i ULTRA (the alpha male) of all Nvidia products is here to give Intel a run for their money. The DDR clock runs at 2,000mh, sli is running in x3 mode with version 2.0 PCI-e. Ok this board might not sound amazing but to all those Nvidia Chipset lovers, this is the board of all boards.

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