HotHardware, PC Perspective and TechReport take a look at Intel's Skulltrail dual-socket enthusiast platform that features a truly tweakable motherboard coupled with unlocked Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors clocked at 3.2GHz, primed for use with both SLI and CrossFire.

The synthetic tests from SiSoft Sandra showed some of the potential that having eight cores of processing power offers while our multimedia encoding results had that potential realized to a certain degree. Seeing the DVD encoder run 63% faster than we had previous seen before while getting 31% and 25% increases in Windows Media Encoder and DivX encoding respectively really put things in perspective. Some will argue that doubling your investment with two CPUs instead of one and only getting a 25-63% is a waste, but high end consumers that do this work on a daily basis will probably disagree.

Professional applications like those we demonstrated, POV-Ray and CineBench, see immediate performance gains moving to Skulltrail and a pair of QX9775 processors. These rendering applications saw as much as an 87% increase in performance. The synthetic gaming results from 3DMark06 and Valve's source tests looked like Skulltrail would be a great performer in the gaming world, but that turned out to be not entirely true. While the POTENTIAL might be there, in this case, it wasn't realized.Finally, PCMark Vantage did give the performance win to Intel's Skulltrail solution but, but by a pretty minor delta. In some cases, such as the photo editing section, Skulltrail's gains could be considered noticeable, but in most cases that wasn't true. It would be hard to argue for a Skulltrail upgrade over a single CPU system for these workloads.

It is very easy to summarize Skulltrail's performance. Due to the system's relatively high-clock speeds and eight processor cores, Skulltrail significantly outperforms every other platform in multi-threaded applications that can utilize all of the system's CPU resources. In single-threaded situations as well, the 3.2GHz QX9775 processors with their 1600MHz FSB frequency also allow Skulltrail to finish at or near the head of the pack in most tests. It's only in memory bandwidth limited situations, where all of the CPU cores aren't utilized, that Skulltrail doesn't dominate due to the use of DDR2-800 FB-DIMMs.

Of course, performance and power this prodigious will come at a price. We don't yet have official numbers from Intel, but Skulltrail-based systems should be available for sale in the next month or so. I wouldn't be surprised to see the core components-the D5400XS motherboard, dual Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors, and two 2GB 800MHz FB-DIMMs-add up to over four grand, when that day comes. If that sort of price tag doesn't scare you off, you probably fall into one of two categories. Either you're a professional who works in a field where this order of computing power can save you tremendous amounts of time-game development, digital content creation, scientific computing-or you're a hobbyist with plenty of cash to burn and bragging rights on the line