Vigor's Colossus gets you close to Skulltrail, bankruptcy

We're not going to set this one up with some creepy bedtime story like Vigor does on its own website, but seriously, this beast is kind of scary. The aptly-dubbed Colossus houses Intel's Skulltrail platform along with two Core 2 Extreme QX9775 quad-core processors, and that's just the beginning. You'll also find a menacing (albeit somewhat unsightly) chassis, a 1,000-watt PSU, 4GB of DDR2 RAM, twin 74GB Raptor hard drives, 2TB of storage on a pair of RAIDed SATA HDDs, dual 512MB GeForce 8800 GTS Xtremes, a dual-layer DVD burner (skimp much?) and a 3.5-inch floppy drive for loading up your tax template from 1998. As you can probably surmise, this one won't run you cheap, so we'll leave it to you to decide if forking out a small fortune $6,799 is worth it.

[Thanks, Zee]

[Tom Oliveri @ Feb 20th 2008 8:07AM]

about the skulltrail motherboard:

didnt AMD try this as an alternative to quad core and fail miserably?

i wonder how this thing stacks up.. ( i know you posted benchmarks but i cant find a similar single-quad core setup equivalent benchmark anywhere.

[Shadowise @ Feb 20th 2008 8:09AM]

I'm pretty sure Skulltrail will walk all over AMD's 4x4 platform.

[Zeus.:God @ Feb 20th 2008 9:59AM]

Well duh, it uses 2 processors that not only rape those the 4x4 was made for, but the Skulltrail chipsets are FAR newer and more efficient.

[Samo @ Feb 20th 2008 8:13AM]

Hang on, all these brute and OVERKILL! [said in UT announcer's voice] power in the CPU, dual Raptors and 4Gigs of RAM, only to be paired with the sub-par and dated 8800GTS?

C'mon, if you're going to overkill, you may as well go the whole hog and get SLi 8800Ultra, or even SLi 8800GTX!

[Bryan Jackson @ Feb 20th 2008 9:05AM]

The new 8800GTS at 512 MB is faster than an 8800GTX. It uses the Nvidia G92 processor which is based on a 65nm process and runs cooler than an 8800GTX. Because of this clock speeds are higher and efficiency is much better. The 8800GTX (and it's overclocked brother the Ultra) is dated, not the 8800GTS.

I will agree that Nvidia could have done better to differentiate the old GTS's and the new GTS's however.

[Rususeruru @ Feb 20th 2008 8:21AM]

Floppy Drive... SWEET NOW I CAN LOAD UP LEMMINGS FOR DOS!

Though I have my doubts that the game would actually run or that the disks are still locatable and in working condition...

[emailtabs @ Feb 20th 2008 10:06AM]

Ive still got a wolfenstein3d floppy hanging about somewhere.

I'll sell it ya for £ (however much Colossus costs).

personally i think its a good deal. you should seriously think about it.

[Metkis @ Feb 20th 2008 10:16AM]

Oh, it's run, just 1000x faster than playable speeds.

[iptydafu @ Feb 20th 2008 8:26AM]

Fantastic. It'll be a half-hour until it hooks-up with Guardian. I'll still be stuck making the same damn spread-sheets.

[amrumjul @ Feb 20th 2008 8:38AM]

the 8800gts 512mb is neither dated nor sub-par. it may not be as fast as the ultra but it's better than the gtx and has the more efficient g92 chip.

[Samo @ Feb 20th 2008 9:01AM]

Just re-read that description, and you're right... It's a G92 chip 8800GTS, and not the crappy, dated and sub-par G80 8800GTS...

**DAMN YOU NVIDIA AND YOUR CRAPPY NAMING SYSTEM!!!**

To mod my inital post, delete the last 4 words and it'll become valid

[PEZ @ Feb 20th 2008 8:39AM]

It should have at least 8GB of RAM. What a pile of shit.

You might as well buy yourself a scientific calculator without a screen - something Apple is coming out with later this year.

its called the iSht.

[jivetrky @ Feb 20th 2008 8:51AM]

8GB of RAM? So you can play Crysis, COD4, TF2, Bioshock, and UT3 and just ALT + TAB between them?

[Dualboot @ Feb 20th 2008 9:04AM]

Just for the sake of argument, which OS are you going to run on this 8GB machine? If it's supposed to play games, I would recommend Windowz, which does not recognize anything over 4GB on a 32bit system. Does Crysis run on a 64 bit system?

[dave @ Feb 20th 2008 9:18AM]

8GB of ram..hahaha...wow, that made my morning! Planning on playing Crisis on a server? hehehe, 8gb

[mattclarkie @ Feb 20th 2008 9:18AM]

Why would you spend thousands on a 32bit Rig. Crysis should run on x64, because it shouldn't require anything but the native drivers and the vista inteface, other games such as Bioshock run fine on x64.

[Jon @ Feb 20th 2008 8:42AM]

not a fanboy, but I wonder how apple's mac pro stacks up in price/performance

[Jon @ Feb 20th 2008 8:43AM]

not a fanboy, but I wonder how apple's mac pro stacks up in price/performance

[Arnie @ Feb 20th 2008 8:49AM]

The floppy for the people who dont build their own systems is for loading BIOS when you generally overclock you are going to POST and the floppy allows you to load back original settings for your motherboard,generally most enthusiast boards and systems have it. Also, the 880GTS is a nice card(is faster than 8800GTX but not Ultra). Make no mistakes, this is a killer system and for the price is pretty good specs.

[Malayvanti @ Feb 20th 2008 9:00AM]

DDR2? I thought Skulltrail used FB-DIMMS...

[Mike @ Feb 20th 2008 1:25PM]

That's what I was wondering

[Danny Lee @ Feb 20th 2008 9:56AM]

Must have! ;)

No, seriously, you pay 7000$ for PC and then like 100$ / month for electricity if you use it 10-12 Hours/Day.

[Metkis @ Feb 20th 2008 10:14AM]

Who would honestly pay that much for something that doesn't even have DDR3.

[nano2nd @ Feb 20th 2008 10:15AM]

Would make a great Hackintosh. But then, what was the price of a Mac Pro again??

[Zeus.:God @ Feb 20th 2008 10:24AM]

The price of the Mac Pro? Starts around 2000-2500 dollars or something like that- but then again, it's nowhere near being as powerful as this.

[Zak @ Feb 20th 2008 11:18AM]

Zeus - nowhere near as powerful? You want to try again? Maybe not for gaming, but that's only because of the SLI 8800GTXes. And since the Colossus is a gaming machine, that's great. In terms of raw power, the Colossus isn't really any faster than the Mac Pros, despite being 3x more expensive.

[Zeus.:God @ Feb 20th 2008 11:24AM]

You're funny.

From what I've seen you're just another ignorant Apple fan, so I'll just pretend you didn't say that, ok?

[Zak @ Feb 20th 2008 11:33AM]

Oh the irony of calling me ignorant. Do you even know what chips the Mac Pros have in them? I'm guessing not, or we wouldn't be having this conversation.

[Zeus.:God @ Feb 20th 2008 4:38PM]

They have what, an octo-core Penryn? That's all well and good, but see, this has 2 quad-cores both of which are FAR faster than what's in the Mac Pro.

Ignorant little Apple fanboy. They never get old...

[Zeus.:God @ Feb 20th 2008 4:41PM]

Wow... That was extremely dumb... The Mac Pro has 2 quad cores as well, but still no where as fast as these.

[WhyFi @ Feb 20th 2008 11:01AM]

Unsightly chassis? That looks to be a CoolerMaster Stacker 830, one of the best cases around...

[Zeus.:God @ Feb 20th 2008 11:09AM]

You can't expect them to like anything that's not made entirely of brushed aluminum with half eaten apples all over it...

Sad really.

[macona @ Feb 20th 2008 12:17PM]

Be careful, this computer may link up with soviet mainframes and attempt to take over the world.

[w00t @ Feb 20th 2008 1:44PM]

Newsflash! The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991!

[macona @ Feb 21st 2008 11:43AM]

Guess you never saw the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project.

[TheHiFiKid @ Feb 20th 2008 1:35PM]

I think that chassis is quite appropriate for the power of that machine. Has a ominous 70s IBM/HAL 9000 feel to it.

[James Cameron @ Feb 20th 2008 1:36PM]

For that price and no water cooling or a Blu-ray rom? You better off getting the Intel Skulltrail motherboard and save a yourself $2000 and get 2 Intel Xeon E5430 Harpertown 2.66GHz($500each) and OC it instead.

[w00t @ Feb 20th 2008 1:42PM]

Wait a minute.... 2 x Core2?!
I thought only the Xeon could do dual sockets, or is this just a rebranded Xeon?

Oh and whoever said the Mac Pro was much slower... guess again!
8 x 3.2Ghz Xeons is dead on par with this, except the mac pro can take double the memory, it's a serious workstation and a worthy competitor.

Set it up with RAID 5 using the hardware RAID option and 32GB RAM and it'll eat this machine for breakfast

[Gav @ Feb 21st 2008 12:40PM]

4GB? Excuse me? 4GB of RAM on a $6,800 system? I'd have expected 8GB.

[metalocalypse999 @ Feb 22nd 2008 2:13AM]

For $7000 id expect the default case to be no less than thermaltake xaser VI aluminum and VGAs to be the dual 3870 x2's (CFX) as well as having a phase change cooler for EACH of the qx9775's... If the do this i will forgive them for not putting up 8gb standard. I have spoken...

[HA!!!! @ Mar 2nd 2008 8:59PM]

Hmm. I own that "unsightly" chassis, except mineis silver.