Memory – Quad-Channel with FB-DIMMs

Since the D5400XS motherboard is equipped with the 5400 workstation chipset which supports neither DDR2 nor DDR3 memory, the Skulltrail system can only be equipped with FB-DIMM modules. Fully Buffered modules were originally developed for use in workstation and server systems and was never meant to find its way into desktop computers.

At their core, FB-DIMMs are basically a refined type of DDR2 memory that uses a serial data connection to the memory controller instead of a parallel one. This makes it completely incompatible with standard DDR2 and DDR3 memory.

Compared to DDR2 and DDR3 memory, FB-DIMMs implement more error correction protocols. While this is positive for data integrity (think server environments, here), the downside is that they also cause a performance hit and cannot be turned off.

Even the temperatures of the FB-DIMM modules can be monitored.