Years ago I had my heart set on a dual-CPU AMD system, and Asus made pretty much the perfect motherboard for this. This was the basis of the AMD 4 x 4 I mentioned before. Performance with the Opteron CPUs of the day was pretty good for a 4 core system. Mind you this was no gamer system - most games in those days could not handle more than one core. Even today, most games cannot utilize more than 3 cores. But this system was targeted at the extreme enthusiast consumer. You could be ripping CDs, video editing, web surfing, playing a computer game, etc. - all at the same time. Also, the board has some great overclocking capabilities. Overclocking means running the CPU and other parts faster than factory specifications. So far the world record for overclocking is running an AMD Phemon II at 7.127 GHz - but that requires liquid helium or liquid nitrogen - and a lot of hassles.
Intel must have felt threatened or something, probably because AMD had the hearts and minds of most of the computer enthusiasts. Anyway, Intel released a motherboard called Skulltrail that was a dual-CPU enthusiast board. It was popular with a few people, but the board was sort of an abomination - Intel took parts from some of its server products, and threw them together (badly). It even ran faster than AMD's board - but will no elegance, and less performance than had they taken the time to do it properly.
About this time AMD's quad-core Phenom was out, but it's performance was much less than AMD had promoted. Intel had quad-core CPUs too, but they were the last gasp of a dying Front Side Bus (FSB) architecture. Finally, word was already out about Intel's Nehalem - almost an exact copy of the AMD architecture I respected so much. So I decided to wait.
Nehalem, or Core i7 parts started shipping in the last half of 2008, and while Nehalem was designed for dual and quad CPU systems, the Core i7 could not run dual-CPU. In the first half of 2009 Intel finally released the Xeon 5500 series - finally a Nehalem that could run dual-CPU.
There has long been rumored a Skulltrail II that would be a dual-CPU Nehalem enthusiast-class motherboard. It was even hoped that Intel might even do it properly this time. But we're in the deepest recession of our generation and there is even less incentive for Intel to come out with something so exotic for a niche market.
For weeks I checked the internet for dual-CPU Xeon 5500 motherboards. There were a lot of them out there, but nothing seemed to have the right combination of features I was looking for. Finally I stumbled on the Intel S5520SC workstation motherboard. This was probably the closest I was going to get to a Skulltrail II - and it's only real downside is that it does not support overclocking
S55520SC Features
- Dual CPU Mother Board.
- Extended ATX - larger than a standard motherboard but still fits in to a desktop case.
- 12 memory slots, capable of holding 24 GB of RAM.
- 2 16-lane PCI Express (v2) slots - for Crossfire dual-video cards.
- 1 4-lane PCI Express slot (in an 8-lane connector) capable of handling a FusionIO SSD board.
- ICH10 RAID controller
- Extensible Firmware Interface - the successor to the ancient BIOS.
There are many other features, but these are the ones I care about most. It's not the perfect motherboard, but I'm not going to hold out hope that anyone, even Intel, will come out with a better one.
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