Skulltrail and Asus send workstations overclocking bananas

THE INQUIRER first told you about the expansion of PC overclocking into the previously untouchable workstation-grade dual-socket CPU arena last year. Intel's Skulltrail D5400XS was, of course, the main focus, however another main Intel mobo player, Asus, had its entry with a different feature set - the Z7S WS - which you also heard about here before anywhere else.

Both boards had a difficult birth. Skulltrail, even in its liquid-cooled flavours, couldn't push the dual FSB or 4-channel DDR2 FB-DIMM memory clocks much beyond the default FSB1600 / FBD-800, while the Z7S WS couldn't change memory latencies despite higher FSBs, on top of some early benchmark performance issues.

This past month, both platforms matured.

With its new BIOS 1140, Skulltrail finally supports proper FSB overclocking, while keeping the higher voltages for CPU and chipset stable during long-term operation. Also, this is the first time that a board with 5400 Seaburg chipset can have non-sync FSB and FBD memory clocks - in theory, you could run FBD-800 with FSB1333 now, or more likely, FBD-667 or FBD-1066 with FSB1600 for instance.

On top of that, the SATA SSD, audio and fan settings have been updated, and a couple of hang-ups and failures are solved. And yeah, you can use those half-ratio processor speed settings which I never really liked due to a bit of performance loss with out-of-sync FSB. Either way, you might want to update your precious Skulltrails with the new BIOS - I'm trying it on one as you read.

On the other hand, the Asus entry, with BIOS 0201 on all shipping mobos, has now some nasty FSB OC capabilities, all the way up to dual FSB1900, and you can change more - not enough yet, though - memory, voltage and clock speed settings here too. Of course, this mobo fits into the standard ATX format - the only one of its type and, if not into those hot Nvidia PCI-E v1 bridges and happy with Crossfire or Quadro SLI graphics, you'll be happy to know that you get two full v2 PCI-E x16 graphics slots here.

With stable CPU, FSB and memory performance tuning, and 4++ GHz dual quad-core processors feeding off 16 GB upwards of fast quad-channel memory, these mobos should provide some multiprocessor overclocking excitement we missed since AMD's aborted QuadFather attempt, and before Intel's Gainestown dual-CPU Nehalems arrive later in the year, bringing a whopping six-channel DDR3 - yes normal DDR3 memory - to the playing field.

We are running both of these right now with the top CPUs, memories and cooling setups - check out the results soon! µ