Skull Trail may make you a happy gamer — until you read the small print
Intel’s latest hardware development has been aired in the form of the Skull Trail motherboard launched at the Game Developers’ Conference and aimed at power-hungry gaming enthusiasts and developers but all may not be as it seems…
The “Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform”, as Intel calls it, is built around a server-class board and supports two 45nm quad-core processors and two graphics cards based on a wide variety of GPUs from Nvidia, ATI including Nvidia SLI and ATI Crossfire architectures. The board also supports:
- Six USB 2.0 ports
- Two eSATA ports
- Gigbit Ethernet
- Firewire
- Five audio mini jacks
- Optical Output for Intel HD audio
Here’s the D5400XS Intel ATX motherboard in all its glory:
The Skull Trail will cost you a mere $650 (part of this going on the FB-DIMM sever memory) but you will have a few other out-of pocket expenses before you-re running Halo 3 on this thing:
- $3000 for two quad-core 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors
- $800 for your choice of graphics card
So, yours for $4450 then!
But there may be a few catches:
Will this motherboard be compatible with Intel’s next generation chips? Probably not.
How hot is this thing going to run? Nvidia’s graphics cards, for instance are notoriously hot-running. Intel engineers have reported that the hottest chips on the board are Nvidia’s bridge chips hooking up the PCIe slots for SLI use. No wonder that in the top photo all I can see are large fan-sink coolers everywhere.
But what’s really strange about this promotion is its targeting at the gaming community. Games, generally, are not great users of multi-threading architecture so even under high demand only two of the eight cores are going to be used at a time. A far better use for this system would be as a 3D rendering machine or movie rendering but for playing games it’s just a waste.
This story on other sites
- GDC 2008: Intel launches Skull Trail motherboard with 8 cores
- Screw it, i might buy the Skull Trail.
- Intel Skull Trail
March 24th, 2008 at 12:56 pm
It is really impressive, but the price …
July 18th, 2008 at 6:20 am
Don’t forget the limited speeds of FB-DIMM (fastest yet would be 667MHz) and the significant cost difference to regular ram.
October 7th, 2008 at 3:02 am
NICE BOARD I WOULD LIKE OWN FOR BRAGING RIGHTS THATS ABOUT IT