AMD's QuadFX platform might be dead, but that hasn't stopped Intel from bringing the Skulltrail platform to market. Skulltrail consists of the Intel D5400XS motherboard that supports a pair of LGA771 based Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors. These 3.2GHz, 45nm, quad-core processors have 1600MHz bus speeds and when paired together make a platform with eight cores and offer a total of 25.6GB/s of bandwidth. This is one serious system!

"When it comes to performance the Intel Skulltrail platform is hands down the fastest platform that we have ever looked at. With the dual 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9775 quad-core processors in the system it consistently outperformed the other test systems in multi-threaded tests that could take advantage of the eight cores. The only two areas that the Skulltrail platform didn't shine was in memory bandwidth and gaming. The DDR2-800 FB-DIMMs just don't provide the memory bandwidth needed to compete with DDR3 memory kits and it shows where memory bandwidth does come into play. When it comes to gaming it's not the fact the board is only PCI Express 1.0, it is because the games are not optimized to run on eight cores. In reality many games are designed to run on just three cores as many games are now written with consoles in mind..."



Link: Legit Reviews