Intel shows off Skulltrail

INTEL FINALLY UNVEILED Skulltrail, and it looks to be a winner. When the company first rolled out the original answer to AMD's 4x4 called V8, we were a tad skeptical. I am glad to say that when it comes out a year later, it will be a much better beast.

What is Skulltrail? It is simply a massively massaged Stoakley server board with most of the mods directly affecting gamers. You take a 2S Harpertown system, put in dual Nvidia PCIe chips to allow for 4 true 16x slots, and cut the number of FBD slots from 16 to 4.

It doesn't take a genius to figure out that a dual Harpertown with four GPUs is going to be a monster for gaming. AMD had a potential contender with FASN8, but since it foolishly killed it, Intel is going to own the gaming crown in 2008 no matter what AMD does.

How well does it do? With stock frequencies of 3.40GHz, 1600MHz FSB, dual 8800GTXs and 2 x 2GB Micron FBD-800 sticks, it hit 17006 on 3DMark06. It also scored a bit better than 20K on Cinebench, 21521 to be exact. I wonder where I have seen that before?

There is a lot of tweaking left to be done on this box, but it should be out in a few months, end of the year or early next. By that time, with more memory and four GPUs, well, it is going to be unmatched in performance. Intel had an early version running at 4.0GHz, more is sure to come in short order as the platform matures.

What more is there to say? When we criticized Intel, the lads did the work and came back with what looks like a winner. AMD knifed the competition leaving Intel the uncontested victory in the gaming space. It is no longer a contest, Intel wins this round. µ