Walking Along The Skull's Trail.

A few friends of mine are familiar with the fact that I name all of my computers after Greek or Roman gods; they know this solely because I badger them with this in a vain attempt to use 4 years of otherwise inapplicable Latin. Among these, the pretty-shiny name of Mercury is reserved for my dream computer - a dual-socket SLI beast whose carbon footprint is roughly the same as a sub-saharan African country. Given that I constantly window-shop to find ways to better pimp out my lusty maid, the recent reviews of Intel’s enthusiast Skulltrail board have really peaked my interest.

I’m disappointed, though.

With an abusive price of around $500-$1000 dollars (TechReport.com’s review states that the kit, with the QX series processor, is somewhere around $2000. The QX itself is roughly 1k), the term “enthusiast” apparently is synonymous with “cash cow.” For those of you who say that this is senseless bitching from a cheapskate who isn’t ready to put his money where his mouth is - well, you’re right. Still though, as seen in the 8800 GT, we don’t need to hike up the price so high to have performence hardware. And such a high cost for a motherboard is disconcerting to say the least. How about the video card? The case? The power supply?

And the RAM, oh man, the RAM. Skulltrail’s requisite RAM is mindblowingly expensive, and comparatively slower. As we’re on the cusp of DDR3, having an enthusiast board support only DRAM is depressing. Moreover, it’s kind of offensive: where’s the work? Supporting only server RAM makes the user assume that Intel did absolutely nothing to change its current lineup of server socket 771 boards other than rename it and release it for a higher price. Why buy this dual socket board when I could pick up an Opteron board with PCI-e x16 for absurdly less?

This isn’t to say that this is all Intel’s fault, though. Not enough games out there are supporting some of the mad hyperthreading needed to harness the raw power of an Octal-core gaming rig. Even Crysis, whose sole job as of late appears to be in molesting nubile computers into shriveling, single-digit FPS shells of themselves, doesn’t show a massive gain when swapped from an overclocked Q6600 to a QX octal. We’re not at the point where it matters enough to run an octal core for gaming, yet.

Sorry, Mac Pro.

Still though, bragging rights seem to trump both the Income Elasticity of Demand and rational thought when it comes to enthusiast platforms. Will bleeding-edge gamers drop money on this? Absolutely.