Applications Performance

Performance of the Skulltrail platform in the various non-gaming applications we actually very impressive overall.  The synthetic tests from SiSoft Sandra showed some of the potential that having eight cores of processing power offers while our multimedia encoding results had that potential realized to a certain degree.  Seeing the DVD encoder run 63% faster than we had previous seen before while getting 31% and 25% increases in Windows Media Encoder and DivX encoding respectively really put things in perspective.  Some will argue that doubling your investment with two CPUs instead of one and only getting a 25-63% is a waste, but high end consumers that do this work on a daily basis will probably disagree.

Professional applications like those we demonstrated, POV-Ray and CineBench, see immediate performance gains moving to Skulltrail and a pair of QX9775 processors.  These rendering applications saw as much as an 87% increase in performance.

Gaming Performance

Originally billed as the ultimate gaming platform, we had high hopes for Skulltrail and most were unfortunately left flat.  Let's start with single GPU graphics performance; we tested four major titles including Crysis, Lost Planet, Call of Duty 4 and World in Conflict.  Of those, only World in Conflict saw a real-world gaming experience increase over our standard, dual-core GPU test bed with half the memory.  The others either showed identical performance or a performance drop when run on Skulltrail.

Okay, fine, how about multiple GPUs?  Results were better: all four titles saw gains with the Skulltrail platform over our standard test beds in some way.  Call of Duty 4 saw the biggest benefit from the dual-processors, with some noticeable gains at the 16x12 and 19x12 resolutions.  Lost Planet saw very minor performance increases while World in Conflict saw gains in the minimum frame rate but not the overall average frame rate.  Crysis, unfortunately, did not see large gains; and it was the one we expected to see the biggest change on!

Pricing and Availability

Let's get this out of the way here: Intel is not actually launching the Skulltrail platform today.  They are still claiming that availability in Q1 is target, and that gives them until the end of March to make good on their word.  Pricing is also still up in the air as Intel is going to be silent on it until the Q1 launch time.  We do know though that the QX9775 processors will be more expensive that current Core 2 Extreme processors, so a guess around $1200 would seem pretty likely.

As for the motherboard, Intel is also mum on that, but the cheapest D5400 motherboard I could find our pricing engine was going for $400+.  You can expect this Intel-branded Skulltrail motherboard to go for something along those lines as well. 

Obviously, this makes Intel's Skulltrail platform an exclusive club; maybe even more so than limiting its production, at least according to rumors.

Final Thoughts

Skulltrail is an incredibly interesting product from a technological point of view and any enthusiast would surely salivate at the idea of pairing up two of Intel's powerful quad-core processors with SLI or CrossFire graphics.  The problem is that same enthusiast is probably as disappointed in the raw gaming performance numbers that we showcased today and thus a lot of the appeal is tainted.  Yes, the Skulltrail platform is an amazingly fast media and rendering powerhouse, and users that do a lot of those tasks, with some gaming on the side, will find the appeal of Skulltrail strong.  Pure gamers though will be better off saving some cash and going with a single quad-core processor system with multi-GPU graphics.  Maybe Intel, NVIDIA and AMD can pull together and change that with some driver/firmware/BIOS updates to fix the performance and stability issues we saw, but until, our verdict stands.