Thanks for the reply Casey.

I finally got a reply back from SilverStone, and their TJ07 Chassis, used by CoolIt Systems, will support the EEB SSI form factor. The primary advantage of this setup is liquid cooling.

I've found a third party overclocking utility http://www.tweakers.fr/cputweaker.html the claims to support the Core i7, but I'm not sure if it will support a Xeon 5500 especially in dual-cpu mode. Unfortunately the disscussion site was unavailable when I tried to get more information.

Anyway, the S5520SC is close to the ideal board. One main problem though is that the 4-lane PCI Express slot (slot 2) is only version 1.0, and is connected via the ICH10R. A much better solution would have been to use the extra 4 lanes from the 5520 (there are a total of 36 lanes I believe). Is there some reason this wasn't done in the first place? Anyway, the 4-lane connector at slot 2 is an ideal location for a http://www.fusionio.com/ board which is a great way to give some awesome file system performance to a rig like this.

I assume the BIOS for the S5520SC is EFI, but the technical specs don't come right out and say it - they only seem to imply it via some settings. Is there any better documentation on the BIOS? Again, a better solution would be to have some overclocking settings in the BIOS.

Another improvement would have been to bring the S/PDIF connectors out to the backplate instead of leaving it internal to the board. I can think of many more improvements that would make the S5520SC a great enthusiast board - you could call it a S5520ST ;-)

The bottom line is I'm really interested in getting a S5520SC, but I'll be really disappointed if I get one and later Intel or someone else comes out with a better board along the lines I've outlined above.

Yup, I understand you can't talk about future products, but it didn't hurt to ask :-)

Cheers, Eric

It's not so much that we need to overclock a 5500, it's that we want to overclock a 5500

I vaughly recall seeing somewhere that the 5580 is unlocked like the i7-965 XE, but I can't be sure. Can anyone confirm this?

I'm planning on running a Xeon 5580 rig with a CoolIT Boreas. Given that it uses active cooling to keep the water well below room temperature, I'm hoping a stock 5580 will stay in Turbo mode longer than a conventionally cooled one.

But seriously, I really want to run my 5580's at at least 4.0 GHz - Intel should give us a way to do that. You pay that much for a CPU, you should at least get some bragging rights

At any rate, if Intel do come out with a SkullTrail II, I really hope they don't botch things the way they did on the first SkullTrail. At a minimum, a SkullTrail II should be better than a S5520SC.

Cheers, Eric

OK, I've been hearing more and more about a Skulltrail 2, for example

Exclusive: Intel "Skulltrail 2" is based upon 8-Core Nehalem-EX

I recently purchased an S5520SC and two 5570's, but I have not assembled them yet. I'm trying to decided wether to return these parts and wait for the Skulltrail 2, but I cannot find any details on the new motherboard. Could someone please take pity on me and release a few details, or at least an announcement date.

Cheers, Eric

hypermeta: I looked for many months to find the right 5500 workstation board. I knew I wanted a dual processor Xeon 5500 system, and I had hoped that Intel would come out with a Skulltrail 2 designed for the enthusiast, but I still have heard nothing but rumors on the web.

I finally settled on the S5520SC for the following reasons:

1. It was a dual processor Xeon 5500
2. It could support up to 24 GB of RAM
3. It had two, 16-lane PCI Express 2.0 slots for graphics cards
4. It had a 4-lane PCI Express slot for a FusionIO SSD card.
5. It had an ICH10R southbridge for RAID 5 support.

In my case I went with the CoolIT Systems Boreas chassis, based on the Silverstone TJ07. I ordered their new WS240 CPU cooler (for the CPUs) and had them install it. This took quite a bit of work because they had never installed that cooler in this chassis before. I had to send the chassis back once because they had not accounted properly for the geometry of the S5520SC motherboard. Once I got it back everything fit properly. I'm saving the Boreas chiller for my two Radeon 5870 X2 cards I plan to buy this fall.

I just got the chassis back last Thursday and got the system up and running on Friday. I have Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit RTM running, but overall the experience has been really disappointing because:

1. The Power On Self Test (POST) takes a long time. I wish there was a quick start setting somewhere.
2. The BIOS does not use the Intel Matrix Storage Manager, like most modern systems, but instead uses some hard to find, frustrating to use, utility that does not even work right. For example, it is not possible to create two separate volumes on the array with different RAID layouts - you can only create multiple volumes with the same RAID layout on each.
3. I tried using the Deployment CD from Intel, but the RAID setup for that was even worse than the BIOS RAID setup.
4. There is a problem with the audio system - often it gets into a state where it pauses frequenly with a glaring sound like the Realtek audio is underrunning. I tried installing the audio drivers from the Intel CD, but it makes no difference.
5. One of my favorite applications is Second Life, but the UI keeps pausing every two seconds for about a second, which is really annoying. I've never seen this behavior on any other system. It seems other applications have these routine pauses running on the S5520SC too, but I can't be sure yet.
6. There does not seem to be any technical support available from Intel except for this forum I have found, and responses here are few and far between.

Given my experiences I am hesitant to recommend the S5520SC to anyone else, but I cannot see why it is lacking for your needs. You should be able to run two GX 295 graphics cards in SLI - the cards should have their own power connectors and should not have to rely completely on the PCI Express slots. I'm using a Radeon 4870 for the time being, and it has two 6-pin power connectors. What makes you think there is not enough power being supplied to the PCI slots?

Also, I do not understand why you would want to run a dual processor motherboard with only one processor?

Cheers, Eric

hypermeta: I'm still discovering more about my system... I was running Task Manager with nothing else running on the system, yet it showed that all the threads were busy. One thread, the first, seemed to be the most busy, which seems fairly normal, but it was not pegged. I cannot understand why the other 15 threads were busy. In fact they would start out at about 60% busy and then slowly taper off until nothing, then start out busy again. They all seemed to be synchronized, which is very suspicious. The problem is when I went to the Processes tab in the Task Manager nothing showed that it was busy at all, except the System Idle process.

I'm starting to wonder if anyone has ever run Windows 7 on a system like this before. Now I'm asking questions in Windows 7 forums to see if anyone else has any ideas.

By the way, one of the reasons I plan to use Radeon graphics cards is that Cross Fire is definately supported on the S5520SC.

Anyway, I wish you luck with your S5520SC - please keep in touch with your experiences.

Cheers, Eric

Well I finally found a fix to the pausing problem in Windows 7 - DriverHeaven - basically you have to make sure both of your network ports are connected to a network. Other than that Windows 7 seems to be running fine.

The main problem I'm having now is that my 5520 IOH keeps overheating. At better design would have been to attach a low profile heat-pipe to somewhere where the heat can be removed better with a fan or water block. Stuck under the tail ends of the grapics cards it's hard to cool it properly.

thewaves - I'm sorry to hear that you cannot boot from your Adaptec 5805. Which PCI slot do you have it in? I was planning on getting a FusionIO board to boot from and putting it in the 8-lane slot (which is opnly 4-lanes electrically).

What do you have the SSD drives attached to? the Adaptec or the ICH10R?

I've invested well over $10,000 on my system, and well over 50 hours as well. I've had some success as I finally got my System running with Windows 7 on RAID 5 with 2 TB disks (after being told by Intel Technical Support the board would not support 2 TB disks).

Cheers, Eric