Other board features are what one would expect on a high-end enthusiast motherboard and include 4 PCI Express x16 (1.1) slots, 2 PCI slots, Intel High Definition Audio, Intel Matrix Storage Technology (RAID 0,1,5,10), Intel PRO 10/100/1000 LAN, 10 USB 2.0 ports, 8 SATA 3.0 Gb/s ports (including 2 eSATA), and a Parallel ATA (2 devices) connector. As mentioned previously the PCI Express lanes support both SLI and CrossFire technology. Since the NVIDIA nForce 100 chips are being used PCI Express 2.0 support is out the door, so PCI Express 1.1 will have to do.
Intel recommends a kilowatt or better PSU for a system with 4GB of memory, two GPUs, and two CPUs. If you want to run four GPUs and 8GB of memory, they recommend a PSU rated for over 1400W! Legit Reviews has a few PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 1kW-SR power supplies laying around and was able to make do with one and had no problems with 4GB of memory and a pair of GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB video cards running SLI. Remember Intel D5400XS motherboard has dual eight-pin aux power connectors in addition to the 24-pin ATX connectors, so you'll need a power supply that has the right connections.
Before we move on we have to show the LGA771 socket and the unlocked Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors we will be using for testing. Clocked at 3.2GHz, these 45nm processors with dual 1600MHz front-side buses are sure to perform great. They are based on the LGA771 Xeon (Harpertown) architecture even though they have a feature list that is nearly identical to the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770. Intel informed us that this setup will offer a total of 25.6GB/s of bandwidth, so this is hands down the most powerfull system that we have ever looked at. The processors are also part of the reason for the high power supply requirements as these 3.2 GHz quad-core processors with dual 6MB chuncks of L2 cache have a TDP rating of 150W. This TDP is just a little bit higher than the 136W TDP of the QX9770, but otherwise, they are virtually equivalent processors. It will be interesting to see what cooling solutions enthusiasts come up with for this platform!
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