Intel SkullTrail at 4GHz, Air and Water Cooled
The system on the left is a custom Alienware rig based on the Skulltrail platform that features a liquid-cooling system and a pair of GeForce 8800 Ultras running in SLI mode. The dual Core 2 Extreme X9775 processors in the system were running at 4GHz (10 x 400MHz), and according to the BIOS hardware monitor, the chips hummed along at a relatively cool 40 degrees while idling. The system's specifics can be seen in the CPU-Z screenshot above.
Intel SkullTrail @ 4GHz Air and Water Cooled
In addition to the Alienware system, the folks from Intel's performance lab also assembled an air-cooled SkullTrail system of their own, which also happened to be clocked at 4GHz. This system, however, used a pair of Thermalright air coolers on the processors. With these high clock speeds, and some relatively speedy DDR2-800 CAS 3 FB-DIMMs, the 4GHz SkullTrail rigs burned through the Cinebench R9.5 multi-threaded test in only 6 seconds and the Cinebench R10 benchmark in only 35 seconds.
Stay tuned for more on SkullTrail in the weeks ahead.