Intel Skulltrail 3: 8 vs 4 Core Performance

Benchmarks: QX9775 Up To 15% Faster At 4.00 GHz

By overclocking the Skulltrail system to 3.60 GHz and 4.00 GHz, we were able to improve its performance by 8.1% and 14.9%, respectively. Since only five applications are able to take advantage of the Skulltrail's eight cores, the overall performance improvement is relatively small. Nonetheless, overclocking still pays off.

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Skulltrail 2x Extreme QX9775
Games4.00 GHz3.60 GHz
Warhammer Mark of Chaos18.6%9.3%
Supreme Commander4.1%1.7%
Unreal Tournament 200418.1%9.0%
Serious Sam 214.2%6.6%
Quake 418.3%10.0%
Prey3.2%1.8%
Audio
iTunes19.0%9.5%
Lame20.3%11.3%
Video
Pinnacle Studio 11 Plus5.1%1.3%
Xvid11.1%6.8%
DivX10.4%6.5%
Mainconcept H.264 Encoder13.2%7.9%
Adobe Premiere Pro 2.016.2%11.7%
Clone DVD 217.6%9.4%
Office
AVG Antivirus19.0%9.5%
WinRAR13.6%7.6%
Adobe Photoshop CS319.4%10.8%
PowerPoint to PDF19.6%11.8%
3D Rendering
3D-Studio Max 918.2%9.1%
Cinema 4D Release 1019.4%10.4%
Total:14.9%8.1%

This table shows the performance increase when the QX9775 CPUs are overclocked to 3.60 GHz and 4.00 GHz.

When the Skulltrail system is overclocked to 3.6 GHz, it is only 6.5% faster than the QX9770 at its default speed.

Benchmarks - QX9775 34.1% Faster Than The Q6600

Compared to a Core 2 Quad Q6600, the Skulltrail is 34.1% faster. That's not exactly a huge accomplishment for a system with this kind of a price tag.

The QX9775 offers 51.7% better performance than a Core 2 Duo E6750.

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Skulltrail 2x Extreme QX9775
GamesQ6600E6750
Warhammer Mark of Chaos-3.4%-10.9%
Supreme Commander2.8%8.4%
Unreal Tournament 20049.1%8.8%
Serious Sam 215.5%-0.5%
Quake 416.6%10.7%
Prey4.9%1.3%
Audio
iTunes30.2%17.5%
Lame35.3%21.8%
Video
Pinnacle Studio 11 Plus11.4%16.5%
Xvid10.3%6.0%
DivX16.9%40.3%
Mainconcept H.264 Encoder81.6%178.9%
Adobe Premiere Pro 2.038.7%113.5%
Clone DVD 228.6%16.8%
Office
AVG Antivirus27.0%12.7%
WinRAR50.0%41.5%
Adobe Photoshop CS331.2%20.4%
PowerPoint to PDF31.4%18.6%
3D Rendering
3D-Studio Max 9113.6%245.5%
Cinema 4D Release 10129.9%265.7%
Total:34.1%51.7%

This table compares the performance of the Skulltrail system to that of a Core 2 Quad Q6600 and a Core 2 Duo E6750.

  • I am a 3D artist so this MoBo will be in my next workstation anyway, but for extreme gamers this review completely missed the point and by more than a mile! First off, looking through all the benchmarks, the overclocked skull trails are top of the bunch in nearly every test, and sometimes way ahead of the others, and anyone that’s going to buy this MoBo is going to overclock! Secondly, I don’t think anyone is going to care about a little extra fan noise for this kind of power, and most likely extremist gamers and 3D pros will use liquid cooling on the CPU’s and Southbridge anyway. But the biggest point of all that toms hardware completely missed is that this MoBo is future proof! Within the next 2 years, 8 core single chips processors will be a reality from Intel and AMD and game developers are going to take full advantage of this I assure you! So in 2 years time when you people that decided to buy a single socket qx9770 system because of this review, and are looking at the benchmarks of people running 8 core systems on the latest games, you’ll probably be cursing toms hardware for this dumb review and feeling sick to the stomach that its upgrade time again, while the people that don’t believe everything toms hardware says is “the law“, and don’t have their heads firmly squeezed up toms dark and scary place, and that are capable of free thinking, will have a huge smile on their faces that their systems brought 2 years ago can still compete with the big boys and that they wisely spent those few extra $$$, £££ or €. I’m certainly not going to let a few games running ever so slightly slower in the now, putting me off buying a MoBo that will run the next gen of kick ass games 1 or 2 years from now. Dumb review toms Hardware dumb!
    Reply
  • Intel BIOS release 1140 officially supports FSB overclocking and memory ratio overriding. FB-DIMM 800 sticks are also way cheaper now than 6 months ago and I guess they will score sky high with active cooling and low latencies. what about a new testing of the platform with a couple of X5272 to show how easily they cross 4GHz? As my point of criticism, this article should stress the price of the skulltrail is less than half of a single QX9770/QX9775 processor and building a 1P intel system with nvidia chipset can be way harder than this 2P offering.
    Reply