The Bios

The Skulltrail Bios we tested was a newer 0821 variant and Intel engineers sent it to me when I was experiencing some minor configuration issues. It resolved these issues and helped with some overclocking which I will detail later in the article. The bios still has a certain workstation feel but there are a good amount of tweaking options available to the end user.

As shown above, the 0821 bios main screen as well as one of the QX9775 cpu's showing 6x6144kb (12MB) of level 2 cache ram. Also apparent are the 4x2GB modules installed, giving us a Quad interleaved configuration. Details of the added benefits of 4 slot Quad memory are detailed in various sections of the review.

The hardware monitoring section is detailed and shows all the voltages as well as temperatures and fan speeds. The picture was taken when I was using watercooling so the absense of CPU fan speeds is not worrying ! Interestingly, measuring with a diode, the CPU temps are overreading by 7-10c on both CPU's. It is not very often you get an accurate bios with regards to temperatures however. I also attached a 120mm Fan on a Zalman swinging arm over the ram modules which dropped the temperatures 10c (from 46c to 36c). Fully buffered memory can get hot so it always the first thing I do with a system like this to ensure maximum stability.

Here we see the Skulltrail overclocking options which are very capable, you can change voltages to the CPU, FSB and chipsets as well as altering multipler and clock frequencies directly. CPU voltages range from 1.2875V to 1.6V with a .3 voltage offset available. The maximum voltage would be a silicon frying 1.9V, not advisable unless you are on phase change cooling. The front side bus can be toggled from 1.1 v up to 1.5V and the north bridge voltage can be changed from 1.25v to 1.6v. All settings have 0.025v fine tuning increments so a considerable amount of tweaking is possible. The multipler on the board can go right up to 39x400 = 15.6ghz. The FSB can be pushed to 550mhz from 400mhz so if 15.6ghz isn't enough the theoretical maximum would be 39x550 = 21.4ghz. It will be quite some time before we can thoroughly test this aspect of the bios.

There are various memory tweaks available with timing adjustments.

The PCI express bus can be overclocked as you can see in the image above. Most of the remaining bios screens are pretty run of the mill however for the sake of being thorough you can browse these below.