Intel Skulltrail vs. Intel Skull Canyon

[Turtlesocks]

A battle of the ages - can the biggest and baddest setup from 2008 beat out the pocket-sized NUC? We ran each through a large variety of tests, from professional applications to gaming, to see just how far Intel's technology has come.

Show full review

 

[bubbly1724]

Can we go back to proper review photography rather than these off-angle glamour shots?

 

[Nuckles56]

Amazing how far we've come in the last 9 years really

 

[5DVX0130]

Technology sure has advanced.
Would have liked to see more CPU bound tests. Beside that…

Storage benchmarks are pointless, for obvious reasons.

The price comparison at the end is just plain BS, since you're comparing Apples to Oranges.
Prices are also weird, and I’d really like to see the actual price breakdown.

Are you seriously implying that a full desktop Skylake in only slightly better?
Seeing as you are doing exactly that, price and performance wise, you could have added that system to the bench (one added page).

Integrated GPU does just fine (not really), but at the same time you’re dragging “serious” gamers in the review.
DOOM @1080p and you're getting 26FPS average?

There is just so much wrong here, I don’t even … it’s just oozing with bias.
It’s great that you like the NUC so much, but that doesn’t make for a good review.

 

[Ruru]

Nice review, it would be cool to see the Skulltrail system with more modern graphics though.

 

[erixx]

Nice and interesting review. But the conclusions should consider at least 2 comparable systems: i would have used a desktop of same price range and a desktop of same performance against the NUC. Anyway it is sort of a praise of the NUC review, isn't it? : )

And as always I have trouble finding the price in TPU reviews, this time more... It is not 1800 €/$ for sure (final table).

 

[Mescalamba]

That Skulltrail setup is a beauty..

 

[hat]

At the end of the review, the Skulltrail and Skull Canyon setup seem to come to the same price; however, the Skull Canyon setup mentions a GTX1070 with some sort of external enclosure, which is nowhere to be found in the review other than at the breakdown on the last page. Sure, it's more powerful than that beast from 10 years ago, while being much less power hungry and in a much smaller case, but you can't compare it to Skulltrail from 10 years ago in gaming. The 9800gx2 is ancient and obviously not up to snuff with today's grueling titles, but neither is that integrated graphics. No "serious gamer" or streamer is going to be using this without that external enclosure with a decent video card in there. A more interesting and fair angle would be to run gaming tests with that GTX1070 in both systems. That would show what each system is capable of with equal graphics power.

I do, however, find the productivity benchmarks valid. It's interesting to see what a mediocre CPU today can do compared to that behemoth from 10 years ago. That Skylake chip reliably beats those two Yorkfields at every turn. You're comparing a quad with HT (4 cores, 8 threads) clocked a tiny bit slower (3.1GHz 4 core turbo compared to 3.2GHz) than two of the most powerful quad cores (no HT, so 8 cores/8 threads) from 10 years ago. This is where 10 years of development really shows. Then again, I wonder who would be doing serious productivity work requiring tons of CPU power with this thing. Most people who need that kind of power would have the modern equivalent to that Skulltrail system, not some travel friendly little thing.

 

[Hokum]

I was looking at the Skullcanyon NUC last year, but for the price of the BARE NUC sans drives, memory, OS etc, I could buy a Alienware Alpha with a 960 built in, an I7 and an SSD, Ram, OS for the same price.

 

[erixx]

600 € barebone
+ RAM + SSD (2x150 €) + OS... if you go legit, it makes 1000 €.

 

[krull]

whoa guys.. dont stay too much in summer festivals...
1º ... 1000$ skull cañon to 1000$ skulltrail
2º the reasons:
Intel support. graphis card iris is dx12 native. gtx9800 x2 is dx10
Intel chipset controller: old ich7,8,9 and 10 runs on legacy mode in Windows, you are using win10 to benchmark.
nv2 conector is equivalent to pci_e x4 + dma. ich of skulltrail is dmi 2.0
integrated audio controlleres sure are the same... (º!º)
3º today 1000$ skulltrail config: 2 4core lga xeons 771 32gb of ram (64gb 1066mhz.. maybe posible hard to found) dx12card (nvidia or amd) and x-fi pci (for bus usage) hp p410 pci-e x8 and 2 sata sdd in raid 1 with sas to sata cables x2 one in each port (for native hardware controller support) of course one uses 100W of eletric power and the other uses 1kW (º_º). this comparative gives me a diferent results. not only in video playback (can add a Intel t540 Ethernet pci-e x4) and the las joke: whith 1k$ and hp oem hd8990 vga?
4ª Little explain about drivers in win 10. (with my inglis..) if u install rst 15.xx in w10 with old hardware u got a direct S.O. reinstallation. soundcard of skulltrial is pci and skullcañon is pci-e. i post x-fi pci for xdram cache but a soundcard with pci-e bus is qualified. and a same problema is the intallation of win 7 in skullcañon ... not posible, but full w10 in both are posible.
well seems me enought for now. sse 3 benches in video with a bether build can show bether the diferences
5º this is a tech power down review exactly 900W of power down

pd: with my suggested build u can play doom, prey and others

cheers Krull

 

[krull]

lol!!!! 2k$ not 1K .. looking at eBay i saw 2x xeon x5492. 32gb quad chanel ram. hp p410 + 1gb cache. 4 sata 120gb sdd (for Windows system 2gb simultaneous write) havent found 1066 fbdim found 4 x 8GB fbdimm 800mhz 5-5-5-15 1t (mmmm motherboard is quad chanel) lost a 8 years of vga generations (but thinking on basic dx12 for comparative) the Ethernet comtroller and a sound card. looking a lot of potos of diversity of chasis.

ah, i found 1 more point to favor skull canyon. when your girlfriend kick your but out of home for too much party rocking its easy to get the skullcañon with u and go to another house. compare dx12 to dx12. sse4.1 to sse 4.1 encoding and bus to mmc with bus to mmc not bottlenecked dmi + pci bus + audio soundcard.
at the other hand u can make an atom from its 1º day to today skullcañon. thats the Intel work, low power, eficency and new capabilities, aes aes-ni avx avx2 fm3...

sincerely i think the two greater mistakes of this review are the hdd controllers and the dx12 to dx10 in gamming.

pd yeah the 3º mistake is may english

 

[Vlada011]

Nice review, nice pictures. I miss somehow Intel motherboards. That was time when motherboards look on something.
Intel D5400XS from 2008 is nicer than most motherboards today. I really like Intel . no matter on their gredy politic and saving cost and sometimes very stupid moves completely without explanation why they decide to do on that way.

I would like with Intel Skull logo to replace ROG logo on Rampage VI Extreme. If I build liquid cooling one day I will definitely to engrave that on empty space. I sick of all childish logos today on motherboards.

 

[erixx]

Asus ROG offers 3D printing facilities, check the website, maybe you can put a skull somewhere!