Intel's Skulltrail dual-socket enthusiast platform @ The Tech Report

You know I was extremely excited about Skulltrail, heck I waited for a product like this since the advent of P3 SMP systems back in '00.  Sadly Intel removed the ability to do SMP on anything but their Xeon line leaving the rest of us to ponder our existence.

Well Skulltrail brings many things to the table, Dual Xeon processors, Quad channel DDR2 memory support, and 4 16x PCI Express slots supporting up to 4 GPUs at a time. The Tech Report had this to say after getting the cold shoulder from nVidia bout 3-way and Quad-way SLI.

Skulltrail is a niche product, and it's not one I care particularly about, but these shenanigans make me angrier than anything I've seen from this industry in a good while. This is the kind of crap that makes folks give up on PC gaming and go buy an Xbox. I don't believe for a minute that this is about anything other than vindictiveness. I've heard credible rumors that Nvidia has seeded some PC makers with three-way SLI drivers that work perfectly on Skulltrail. I've also heard whispers that Intel is paying as much as $100 per motherboard for those nForce 100 chips. Yet Nvidia is still locking them out. Sheesh.

On the bright side, Skulltrail ought to work fine with AMD's CrossFire X when it arrives—even though, heh, the D5400XS's PCIe x16 slots are driven by Nvidia silicon. Imagine that.

Seems like we lost yet another nVidia fanboy. 

Related Web URL: http://techreport.com/articles.x/14052