Memory – Not Suited for Desktop and Gaming Systems

It is obvious that the 5400 northbridge was originally developed with workstations and small servers in mind, e.g. or databases, forums or download portals.

Indeed, we were able to verify that the Skulltrail system offers very good performance in these scenarios. In the end, the truth is that this is not the performance profile of a desktop or gaming PC, which is why Intel’s D5400XS Skulltrail motherboard is much slower than a conventional desktop board.

Many advantages exist only on paper as well. For example, FB-DIMM systems can be equipped with much more memory (up to 128 GB) without suffering the same speed penalties as DDR2. However, these extremely high capacities are not required in the desktop space and couldn’t be utilized anyway as a result of the limited number of memory upgrade slots.

In the end, using FB-DIMMs only saddles the Skulltrail platform with a number of disadvantages. After all, this is meant to be a high-end gaming system and not a workstation. Thus, many of the features of FB-DIMMs are not needed, cannot be used and don’t bring any performance improvements to the table, either – despite the fact that any speed increase would be sorely needed.

The option that offers the best performance with FB-modules is interleaved mode.