Questions about the Intel Skulltrail motherboards.

[The_Absolute]

Questions about the Intel "Skulltrail" motherboards.

The Intel "Skulltrail" motherboards, which have two physical CPU sockets, do they make versions of this motherboard which support the Core i7 processors? Will they eventually release skulltrail motherboards which support the future Core i9 "gulftown" processors?

What kind of computer case would have mounts for this type of motherboard? In the future, I was hoping to build a skulltrail computer with two Core i7 or Core i9 extreme editions, with quad crossfire Radeon HD 5870 X2, or the NVidia GeForce GTX 300 series equivalent.

I see a skulltrail Core i7/i9 platform as being necessary for properly handling the humongous throughput of the DX11 graphics cards, especially in Xfire/SLI. Will I probably be spending more than $10,000 on building such a computer?

If I have a lot of money, and willing to spend it, should I go for it?

 

[B. Elliott]

I'd advise against it. Adding more and more cores doesn't increase the amount of information that can be fed for graphics unless the program (or game) can actually make use of the additional cores in the first place. Processor speed/power currently isn't as big of a factor as graphics. An overclocked dual core processor is still more than enough for 90% of the games out there. I haven't seen any information that mentions it supporting i7's or i9's, unless something has come out in the past few months. The FB-DIMM memory is also a big negative for the Skulltrail. Being a holdover from workstation platforms, it generally suffers from high latency and low read speeds. That, and it's DDR2 only. If they were going to make a model that actually supports i7s, they would have to change the motherboard layout it's self due to the integrated memory controller on the i7s. Ie; an entirely new board from the ground up.

It would make a good computer for movie making or 3D rendering. Other than that, save your money and build a system with similar gaming performance for much less money.