Skulltrail (cont'd)

The D5400XS is missing all legacy ports, No PS/2 mice, or keyboard plugs and no serial, parallel or floppy drive connectors either. The only port intel have kept is the a standard ATA connector for optical drives. I appauld this decision, most of these ports just take up much needed space and the enthusiast audience in today's environment have no need for any of these.

All this hardware comes at a high cost with regards to power supply demands. Intel recommend a kilowatt or better PSU for a system with 4GB of memory, two GPUS and two CPUs. If you want to push it further with 4 GPUs and 8GB of memory they recommend a PSU rated 1600w. Dear lord.

For this review we approached the great folks at Enermax who promptly sent us out their highest specification GALAXY 1000w PSU which is one of my favourite supplies available, this thing holds rails like nothing else. We have been using several of these supplies in our testing for the last year and we have yet to find anything they can't handle. Even later in our testing, with an overclocked system and the board maxed out with 8 GB of ram and two graphics cards we never had a single hitch.

The latest Intel bios is capable of the following settings:

Bus speeds	FSB: 133-550MHz in 1MHz increments PCIe: 100-120MHz in 1MHz increments DRAM: 667, 800MHz (Auto by SPD only)
Bus multipliers	CPU: 5x-40x
Monitoring	Voltage, fan status, and temperature monitoring
Voltages	CPU 0: 1.2875-1.6V in 0.0125V increments CPU 1: 1.2875-1.6V in 0.0125V increments DRAM (1.8V): 1.8-2.8V in 0.04V increments DRAM (1.5V): 1.5-2.5V in 0.04V increments FSB: 1.1-1.5V in 0.025V increments NB: 1.275-1.6V in 0.025V increments

The Skulltrail motherboard has a great selection of voltage ranges and the control is very thorough. You can increase FSB in 1mhz increments as well as changing the CPU voltage in 0.0125V increments. If this wasn't enough then you have a 300mv overvolt which can take the board into chip frying territory if you aren't careful. I will address these settings later when I delve into overclocking.

The placement of the SATA ports is top notch, they are at the far side away from the graphics cards, so no matter how long the cards are (even 3870 X2 or 8800 ultra) you are always able to remove and add your hard drives and optical drives.

The shrouded south bridge cooler is well designed and is sure to keep things cool even with a full slate of four PCIe x16 slots populated as the air is forced horizontally across the slots, and it doesn't present any clearance problems either, you just need to make sure the cards are securely fastened otherwise if they slip back at all they can skim the southbridge fan. POST-code LEDs on the bottom corner of the board are helpful for troubleshooting, as are the built in power and reset buttons along the bottom edge of the board.