Intel's New Skulltrail Platform Is Coming

So Intel got the bright idea to start repurposing their server level hardware for gaming. It really is genius, because hardcore servers can deal with massive amounts of processes quite well, and all they had to do was beef up the chipsets for more video performance and add some of the standard things that come on high end gaming boards like high end audio and PCIe x16 slots.

In fact, the board pictured has dual Penryn Xeon processor slots (that's 8 cores for those counting), 4 PCIe x16 slots (quad SLI anyone?), SLI support (did I mention the possibility of quad SLI?), 6 SATA ports, 2 eSATA ports, 1 FireWire port, and gigabit Ethernet. Wow!

That chipset cooler even looks like it was ripped off of a high end video card, and all the heatsinks on the power supplying things surrounding the two processor slots, yeah, this thing is definitely made for the hard core. The only downside is that it will likely sport a hard core price as if the Penryn Xeon processors weren't pricey enough, just for reference, a 3GHz quad-core Clovertown Xeon is $1269 at Newegg.

Intel's newest gaming platform, Skulltrail [via engadget]