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xeon e54** overclocking skulltrail ?

86JR

86JR

86JR

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Im speccing up a rig to use for 3d graphics, photoshop, illustrator, autocad, maya and BOINC / folding aswell as a remote fileserver.

What id like to know is if i buy 2 of the cheapest xeons and the intel skulltrail board, how feasable is overclocking ?

Id run tuniq tower 120's on both (if they fit) and would only really need 3ghz each.

FBDimms are the same sort of price as DDR2 atm (strange that ocuk dont sell them though) and id be looking to run 8gb or so in matched pairs (4x2) on xp 64.

P.S how would a rig such as that with an 8800GTX fair for both rendering and encoding and gaming ?

The 8800GTX i had (bfg) had a tickbox for "professional mode" in its drivers...

Thanks!
 
oh and will the mac ram ocuk sell work ? as its 667mhz FBDIM ECC which the skulltrail board is compatible with ? not sure if it will OC well though, would cool ram heatsinks with fans.
 
what's this going to come to?? 3K???

don't think you should really need that much firepower.

for what you are doing, a good P35, Q6600, 4-8GB or ram and a professional graphics card would be all you need
 
old post, but bump anyway.

I have money to spend and want the power... can anyone answer my questions please ?
 
800 FSB FBdims are reccommended.

8800GTX will make no difference to rendering or encoding. Games will be sweet though.
 
If you're looking at doing 3D modeling etc then you should get a proper graphics card that is designed for it. The ATI fire GL or the Nvidia Quadro FX . You can pay mega bucks and I don't think OcUK sell them. You wouldn't use a spray can to paint an oil painting would you?
 
Shrapnel said:
If you're looking at doing 3D modeling etc then you should get a proper graphics card that is designed for it. The ATI fire GL or the Nvidia Quadro FX . You can pay mega bucks and I don't think OcUK sell them. You wouldn't use a spray can to paint an oil painting would you?
Click to expand...

Been using 3D software since the late 80s and I have never owned a Quadro/FireGL and still don't see the need now.

Something like a 8800GT can throw an enormous number of polys around the screen and unless the applications you intend to use absoulutely require a certified GPU then I think you should be careful before going down this route.

It is very easy to think you need a 'pro' card but my $0.02 worth is just be sure.
 
The skulltrail board is limited by the FBDimms

normal 800 MHz fbdims may allow you to get 400fsb i think Kingpin has managed to get 420 FSB but he's using QX9775 cpu's.

I am using E5420 chips on mine - they have a 7.5 multiplier and with a 400fsb (1600) give 3ghz
 
Janesy B said:
I'm not a massive fan of intels own made boards. The skulltrail is no exception, overpriced and a bit rubbish.
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You can't really compare the skulltrail to any single socket board to be fair. Personally, I think £400 for a dual socket board is pretty good going.

Intel's own brand boards are fantastic, they are pretty much the best value boards you can get with excellent onboard NICs. If you want equivalent NICs, you are normally looking at paying serious money for a server-oriented mobo. They tend to have pretty good BIOSes, which are kept up to date, and with bug fixes. Typically, where they fall down is overclocking features/performance, which is why one might want to opt for a IP35/more consumer-orientated board.

Of course, if you do that, you only have a manky marvell syskonnect NIC to play with.
 
i work for an OEM, the failure rate on intel boards is quite high and issues range from the graphics chip not working to the LAN connection dropping out. plus some of the have flaky bioses and intel STILL havent sorted out the chipset driver issue on the DQ35JO. all our other boards from asus abit and MSI have much lower return rates
 
Well I've just build my new rig using the Skulltrail, 4Gb FB-Dimms and 2 x Xeon X5450's (3Ghz) however I am not that impressed with it as I think my old QX9650 was quicker.

First thing I had to do was flash the mobo's bios as the cpu fans would only run at 100% no matter what the temperature of the cpus! (A known fault that Intels has now fixed)

FB-Dimms also seem to run rather hot.
 
For real world gaming and usage your old system woudl have been quicker - faster clock speed and faster memory.

Only multithreading apps will take advantage of the Skulltrail.

The advertise it as the ultimate gaming board it is infact not by a long shot.
 
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