Intel Skulltrail Platform Motherboard Sneak Peek

What we have for you here, however, is an up close and personal look at the Skulltrail platform's D5400XS Intel ATX motherboard from a couple of different angles. As you can see, the Southbridge and dual NVIDIA nForce 100 MCP chips are actively cooled by a large fan-sink cooler.The motherboard has four PCI Express x16 slots and dual standard PCI slots. Aluminum heatsinks cover the Northbridge and some of the components around both LGA771 Xeon CPU sockets.



As for I/O, the board has six internal SATA ports, a single IDE port, and headers for additional USB and Firewire ports. On the IO plate, no legacy connectors are to be found, but it does have six USB ports, dual eSATA ports, single Firewire and Gigabit Ethernet jacks, and analog and digital HD audio inputs / outputs.

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Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9775 To Cost $1470

On Monday, Intel plans to finally launch many Penryn 45 nanometre cores but only one will be a desktop CPU. The other Harpertown, 45 nanometre based chips will be server only and Intel plans to launch a massive 22 parts next week.

The QX9650 Extreme, which was reviewed, launches on Monday and it will cost a saucy $990, but you can expect a bit steeper end user price.

Intel plans two new cores for Q1 2008, one called QX9775 and second QX9770. The Core 2 Extreme processor branded as QX9770 is 3.2GHz CPU with 12 MB of cache, FSB 1600MHz support and LGA 775. This one will work in desktop X48 boards and it will cost $1370 at launch.

The one with the biggest number QX9775 is also clocked at 3.2GHz and has the same 12MB cache and FSB 1600MHz but it uses LGA771 socket and is reserved for Skulltrail dual socket system only. One of these will cost $1470 and of course two of them, that you need for Skulltrail platform will cost a saucy $3000, only for two CPUs.

Both QX9775 and QX9770 will launch in Q1 while QX9650 launches on the 12th of November.

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