Pictures:

When Tones told us they had a SkullTrail system ready for test, we asked for some extra high-end hardware to go with the this “beast”. Little did I know that within a few days my room would be filled with expensive hardware and all allowed to test. To be honest, I never had this amount of high-end hardware lying around.



SkullTrail system, two Scythe aircoolers, an Enermax Galaxy 1KW, one QX9650 and two QX9775.



Boxed filled with Asus hardware ... perfect fit!



As you can see, this is a big mainboard. Let's have a look at the features:

Extended ATX (eATX) (12.00 inches by 13 inches [304.80 millimeters by 330.2 millimeters])

Four Fully Buffered DIMM (FBDIMM) DDR2 Module sockets up to 8GB, ECC or non-ECC.

8-channel (7.1) Dolby Home Theater Audio subsystem with five analog audio outputs and two S/PDIF digital audio outputs (coaxial and optical)

Nvidia SLI and ATI CrossFire multi-GPU platform support

Gigabit (10/100/1000 Mbits/sec) LAN subsystem

10 USB 2.0 ports (6 external ports, 2 internal headers)

Six Serial ATA 3.0 Gb/s ports, including 2 eSATA port with RAID support supplied by a Marvell controller

Two IEEE-1394a ports (1 external port, 1 internal header)

Consumer IR receiver and emitter (via internal headers)

One Parallel ATA IDE interface with UDMA 33, ATA-66/100 support (2 devices supported)

Four primary PCI Express 1.1 x16 (electrical x16) busses

The board needs a lot of power, so be prepared to attach one 24-pin and two 8-pin power connectors to the motherboard. You can run the board with one 8-pin power connector, however when overclocking, two is highly recommended.



For the extreme overclockers no good news, really. The socket area is quite filled, so insulating will be more difficult.



As said, two Scythe air cooling units on the cpu's.



Memory details.



The QX9650 processor we received.



QX9650 setup fully set up and ready for testing.