nope, skulltrail was never 775, it is 771 which was a server chipset. the qx9775 was never released for commercial use outside of the skulltrail (unless you wanted to drop $1500 for a server processor that would be better served by a xenon anyways). furthermore, essentially all parts of the skulltrail, except for the nvidia nforce 100 mcp, are server parts. even the required ram was server ram, fb-dimm. overall, i would say that since skulltrail has achieved clock speeds between 3.2 and 6.0 ghz it can effectively dominate the i7 chips.eXg. focus wrote: I know everything about the skulltrail. it's socket 775, so of course i7s wouldn't work in it. I just can't imagine that on a CPU only basis that the skulltrail setup would outperform an i7 965. the qx9775 was the cpu of choice in most of the benchmarks I've seen on the skulltrail, still can't imagine two of those beating 8 virtual cores on the 965. I'll see if i can find some comparisons.
having said that, i highly doubt there is a single direct comparison between the two setups as skulltrail was delivered DOA due to cost, availability of parts, practicality, and lack of consumer demand.
ps: you still misunderstood my misunderstanding it seems. i thought you were saying why not use a mobo that supports two i7 cores and i was asking if you knew of any mobos that did. clear as mud?
overall, my whole point is that this is a stupid design from apple that is going to fool a lot of people.
hopefully he does post some comparisons though because the parts are so drastically different it may be hard to really say it is an apples to apples comparison.