Benchmarks prepare to be beaten
When you're unveiling a monster of a gaming-orientated motherboard, what better place to do it than at San Francisco's Game Developer's Conference?
That's exactly the stage Intel has chosen to unleash its enthusiast desktop motherboard, the D5400XS, available now. This behemoth of a board supports two Intel quad core processors and a choice of up to four high-end graphics cards from ATI or NVIDIA.
That's right, it doesn't matter if you have a preference for ATI or NVIDIA, either ATI's Crossfire and NVIDIA's SLI can be utilised to give you the best that graphics has to offer.
So what kind of financing will you need to put a whopping eight processing engines in your PC? Well, the estimated street price for Intel's D5400XS board is $649 and you'll probably want two of Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors for that extra touch of bragging rights - those are only $1,499 apiece. That's $3,647 already, and you've still got to add in your graphics cards and other components.
Still, that's precisely the kind of price you expect to pay for CPUs with 12MB of L2 cache, a 1600MHz system bus and four cores running at 3.2GHz. Double that up on Intel's dual-socket D5400XS and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell you you've got a system that should eat most modern benchmarks for breakfast.
Jeff McCrea, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Digital Home Group said:
"When it comes to delivering innovation to the ultimate enthusiast, our new 8-core desktop platform is a winner. The ground-breaking Intel Desktop Board D5400XS enables the flexibility to pair a variety of quad graphics solutions with two of our fastest desktop processors. The result is stunning PC performance."
Several enthusiast PC manufacturers plan to offer systems based on this new platform starting today and over the next 30 days, including Armari, Boxx Tech, Digital Storm, Falcon Northwest, Maingear, Puget Systems, Scan, Velocity Micro, Vigor Gaming, Voodoo, @Xi Computers and others. Sell your car and start saving now.
Official press release: INTEL DELIVERS ‘HARD-CORE’ EIGHT-CORE PLATFORM FOR PC PERFORMANCE AFICIONADOS
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