If anything could showcase Skulltrail's performance potential it is our 3D rendering benchmarks.
3dsmax r9

3dsmax has always been very well threaded and thus scaling from 4 to 8 cores is guaranteed. Our benchmark, as always, is the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 test but for the purpose of this article we only run the CPU rendering tests and not the GPU tests.
The results are reported as render times in seconds and the final CPU composite score is a weighted geometric mean of all of the test scores.

Scaling from 4 to 8 cores is pretty impressive at just under 40%. You'll also see that the desktop QX9770 is faster than a single QX9775 thanks to the lower latency unbuffered DDR2 memory.
Lightwave 3D 09

Lightwave is another 3D rendering application that we've used from time to time as a benchmark. We used two scenes that come with the application to measure performance: Dirty Building and Old Record Player. We simply rendered the scenes using all available cores, Image Viewer was disabled during the render process.


We continue to see good scaling in Lightwave, approaching 40% from 4 to 8 cores. A single QX9775 continues to be slightly slower than a QX9770 due to the use of FB-DIMMs.
Cinebench R10

A benchmarking favorite, Cinebench R10 is designed to give us an indication of performance in the Cinema 4D rendering application.


Cinebench is the poster child for 8 core performance: we're looking at a greater than 60% increase in performance when going from 4 to 8 cores. This sort of performance can't be achieved with raw clock speed, you need more cores.
POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 24

POV-Ray is a popular raytracer, also available with a built in benchmark. We used the 3.7 beta which has SMP support and ran the built in multithreaded benchmark.

POV-Ray shows almost perfect scaling with the move to 8 cores, there's over a 90% increase in performance from a single to quad QX9775 setup.
This sounds like a great board and for some-one like me that uses 4x22"monitors and does heaps of multi tasking it sounds perfect and would gladly pay the price asked.
BUT why is such a great board slowed right down by not having DDR3 memory sticks,,,because from what I've read at the momment there is not that much difference with running this and what I have now which is a quad core with DDR3 which runs great but I do overwork it.So bigger would be better.
You would think and I'm sure they already know that it would be common sence to make this board with DDR3 as it is it's only fault as far as I can see.
We will probably see that board come out soon or next in line once they have sold enough of these to satify there egos.
Great board but,,,,just not yet I will be waiting for the next one out which will have to carry DDR3,,,if they want to go forward in thier technolagy.
hnolagy