Intel has been on a major campaign to take-back all of the market shares they previously lost to AMD in the last few years and the word wow comes to mind when you the changes they have made. Intel is now dominating all platforms, entry, mid, and high-end, not to mention the server arena as well and are almost untouched in all these areas by the folks in Texas. The V8 was our last great system we took a look at from the boys in blue and the Skull seems bent on pushing the multi-platform environment farther ahead. After my initial impressions I call the Skulltrail, the anything, everything system. Both CrossFire and SLI graphics are available making this is a very one of a kind platform. We really had fun with the whole Skull theme and our system shows it by way of a few nifty mods.
This system lies somewhere between the realms of the server/workstation class computers, but also offers the user the features associated with high-end gaming. The Skulltrail system uses the new QX9775 CPUs, which are basically the same as the QX9770 with a different LGA771 package and the ability to scale past a single CPU, beyond that it's a QX9770. The new platform uses the LGA771 platform motherboards and the first so far is the D5400XS. The Skulltrail doesn't make the bold move to DDR3, but instead still uses high-speed ECC DDR2, which is more stable in many situations including the server arena where memory gets pushed to its maximum. This system is actually geared toward overclockers and the enthusiast's crowd, and sees Intel embracing those they once shunned as the bad boys of the PC world. There is a lot to look at here and we spent the last few weeks playing around with the Skulltrail in an effort to bring you an enlightening review, we hope you like it.
