Same as the original SkullTrail: Maxing out the EVGA would be: 2X Intel Xeon, W5590, 3.30 GHz - £1,242.60 4X Gigabyte HD 5970 - £544.98 6X Intel X25-E, 64GB - £628.50 12X Hynix DDR3, PC3-10600, ECC, Registered, CL 9, 8GB - £325.33 2X Silverstone Strider, 1500W - £278.23 ------------------------------------------------ Total: £ 12.896,54 Inc VAT from Scan And that is without cooling and a case.
Not too bad actually for what you get. Xeon Gulftown might be even better ! 12 cores, 24 threads, (and a meaningless 1:1 thread to GB RAM ratio ^^)
8 x Intel X-25M in RAID0? Not without a dedicated PCI-E 8x SATA RAID controller. The X58 only has a pair of PCI-E 16x links for the ICH10R onboard RAID controller which tops it off at 600MB/sec. More than 3 SSD's is useless without a dedicated controller.
But I wouldn't bet 1 pound that with a board of this high quality they didn't think of this, I'd bet you pence for pound that this board will have a marvell hard drive controller built onboard to avoid that bottleneck.
I would like more info on how they have the slots configured. the IOH can be set up to have 2 PCIe 2.0 x16 slots and one PCIe 2.0 x4 slot. I don't remember what the ICH10 supports for PCIe ports, but it all has to go through the DMI/ESI link which is basically a PCIe x4 connection that I think is running at 1.1 speeds (but it is late for me, and my memory is a bit fuzzy). That's why I commented on using 2 IOHs instead. But it looks like the dual IOH systems that are out there have some strange performance problems (maybe Bit could get a hold of one and pit it against the numbers from that Supermicro board from a while back).
IOH teaming is going to introduce some issues in getting the board to clock-so there was no way they're going to do that. Dual IOH boards may therefore outperform this, once they're a bit more mature. After I finish this build, I'm gonna look at C34. Looks really nice. Though G34 may be the more fun platform.
Seeing as the single 1366 4-Way SLI XL-ATX board only has the ICH10R onboard controller for RAID and this board is essentially the same thing plus an additional socket, I don't see why you're no surprised. In fact, at this price point (~$500 for the 4-Way single 1366 model) why would you even consider a bottlenecked on-board RAID controller? Those who buy these systems would immediatley pickup a PCI-E 8x RAID controller such as an Areca 8-port SAS/SATAII with 3GB local caching and try to push 2.4GB/sec to max out the PCI-E 8x interface.
Small update - I'm meeting up with EVGA in about 40 mins, so will know more then about when we're getting a sample to play with/add to my folding farm.
Bang on, plus my I'm using a board with no onboard SAS controller. I'm looking at either a PERC6/i or one of the giant HP LSi controllers, since both are dirt cheap and very powerful, and readily available on Ebay.
I have one of the older PERC 5i/DRAC combo's running 6 x 300GB 10,000rpm SAS and it's pretty impressive, read speeds up 1.4GB/sec and an average of 1.2GB/sec. For the price on eBay? Unbeatable really. But I do dream of an Areca ... 3GB cache (drool) but the PERC 5i does fine with 512MB.
Unfortunately, no news about a release date yet for this motherboard. Still, we've been promised the first in the UK when it is ready to play with.
So with two sockets and the new six core CPU's, that 12 physical CPU's and 24 total including virtual cores. Who could use all that power in a single PC? Maybe the odd business, but for most it's overkill.
