Memory subsystem performance
We'll start, as ever, with some quick synthetic tests of the memory subsystem, which will help give us the lay of the land before we get into our real-world benchmarks.

This useful little test gives us a look at L2 cache bandwidth. You'll notice that it's multithreaded, so systems with more cores show up as having higher L2 cache bandwidth. Not just one processor or cache is being measured. In fact, the four chips that house this Skulltrail rig's eight cores have 6MB of L2 cache each, for a total of 24MB of L2 cache. All of that cache shows up in this bandwidth test, as Skulltrail's two Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors outstrip the previous-generation flagship 65nm Xeon X5365s at the 16MB test block size.

If we isolate the 1GB test block size, we can get a sense of the relative main memory throughput of these systems. Only AMD's Phenom, with its integrated memory controller, achieves higher throughput here.

Incidentally, we did see higher throughput from a four-DIMM Xeon system in our review of the Stoakley platform, but it came at the expense of....

...higher latencies than we see with our Skulltrail rig. This isn't bad performance for an FB-DIMM-based system, and the lower latencies are likely to pay dividends with desktop-style workloads.