The Black Ops Headquarters:

Entering the "Black Ops" Test Lab area, cameras weren't allowed. Most people think this is the area that definitely needs pictures, but not in the world of technical-industrial espionage. You don't want your future product's potential being comprised by prying eyes. Call it what you want, but no matter how you rationalize theft, it comes down to honor and we're not going to help cheaters out.

Elite Readers Beyond This Point!

I can tell you this, Intel performs a huge series of tests unlike anything I've seen. Every component, feature, and peripheral they make is checked, rechecked, and tested over and over. Everything has to work to the best possible spec, or it receives the necessary modifications to get it there. That's a lot of circuits, ICs, components, and devices that have to be checked.

Take a motherboard for example. Before any product goes gold, it has to pass a crazy series of tests. Voltages will be measured and monitored on the test benches by various black-op techs. Then the boards have to pass voltage, EMI, EMF, and climate testing. Climate testing involves both extreme cold and hot temperatures far beyond what platforms will actually ever encounter. Yeah, I think there were even some little green men from Groom Lake that were trying to backwards engineer one of their boards. Believe it or not, they really do put the boards through a 50G shock and vibration test which checks the board's soldered components.

At any rate, these guys have to take their jobs very seriously no matter how miniscule the tests because it's their reputation on the line. If the motherboard passes every test, it goes gold for final production. The end result is an extremely well tuned motherboard that carries an industry wide 3 Year Warranty.

One of the questions posed by some of our readers was why Intel doesn't use heat pipe cooling on their motherboards? Well, one major reason, heat pipes rarely survive Intel's testing. It also prevents and limits users from adding their own after market cooling solutions since many of the heat pipes span two chipsets and the PWM circuits on the motherboards. This also means Intel can save you some money. I think it's a perfectly good compromise since you get the 3 Year Warranty.

The Toy Room:

The Toy Master!

This was the last objective of the mission, to see the two latest boards under further stress testing and gather a little more benchmark material. Two of the systems were running the Skull Trail boards one water cooled and one air cooled.

Bone Trail 2 (front left), Skull Trail DangerDen (back left), Skull Trail ATI (back right)

To make it simpler to understand, all the systems are 100% stable at 1600 MHz Front Side Bus without having to adjust BIOS voltages. The board is extremely well tuned for the Yorkfield (J) 1600 MHz LGA 771 processors. The Intel 5400 chipset XMP Profiles work quite well in performance and stability.

Skull Trails @ 1600 MHz FSB

Skull Trails @ 4-4-4-12

The only thing missing was a really good TEC or Phase Change CPU cooling system or two. We could crank this puppies up to 5 GHz or shoot for a melt down record. One thing that is always a pleasure about any of the platforms. They seem to be far better at recovering from miscalculated settings than previous generations.

EA Games - Challenge Everything...in DX 10!

System one:

IDF System	UV for the Modders
Massive DangerDen Quad Radiators	8800 Ultra DangerDen SLI

This was the same demo system seen at the most recent 2008 IDF, Intel Developer's Forum. Thanks to the RAID0 configuration, everything loads quickly. The monitor resolution was set to 1920 x OMFG and high details. Despite the processing power, the graphics cards still had a really hard time keeping up 30+ FPS. However, the detail was extremely phenomenal and this is par for the course when trying to max out Crysis at these resolutions.

Crysis DX10 @ 1920 x OMFG - Highest Settings - 34 FPS

One of the most overlooked features of the Skull Trail is the performance that dual Quad Core Extreme processors offer. Sure, it can obviously stomp most every video game around, but there's a lot more to it than that. Users who need processing power for 3D rendering and design, audio formatting and encoding, as well as video formatting and encoding will drop their jaws when they experience what this platform can do. Just pop in an nVidia Quadro FX graphics card and you have the beginnings of your new video game company.

3DMark06 16473 @ 1280 x 1024

If you'd like to compare your own system, try downloading 3DMark06 and run the default test version. Check the CPU Score in the bottom right of the Results list. You might be surprised by your system's results.

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