Binge Gamer

It has been nearly a year since Intel told the world about its “Skulltrail” gaming platform at IDF China. Well, at the GDC in San Francisco this week Intel has unveiled it’s new Dual Socket Extreme motherboard, the D5400XS as part of Intel’s new desktop platform.

So what is the D5400XS motherboard? It’s what Intel calls a “dual socket extreme desktop platform”, which runs on two Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775 Quad-Core processors. In short: This motherboard can support up to eight processing engines, each running at 3.2GHz. The card is also designed to use multiple graphics cards simultaneously via either nVidia’s SLI technology, or ATi’s Crossfire.

It goes without saying that this new platform will blow away any previous benchmarks, and will be able to handle just about anything it could throw at it. A game like Crysis, which makes most modern PCs beg for the sweet release of a cascading system failure, would run on this machine with no problem.

While no official launch for the new motherboard has been announced as of this writing, its estimated price tag will be around $649. Not exactly cheap, is it? When you consider that a single Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775 Quad-Core processor sells at retail for $1,499, you’re looking at a nimimum of over $2,100 just for the motherboard and one of the two processors. Obviously this is for the professional PC enthusiast, and not some average computer builder.