How to build a Skulltrail machine for $2,500
Intel's gunning hard for the high end of the gaming market with the new Skulltrail platform, but nothing about it is cheap -- the D5400XS mobo at the heart of the platform costs $649 to start, and the flagship "fastest ever" config features two $1,499 3.2GHZ QX9775 processors. Still, if you're a hardcore gamer, you know you want it, so the folks over at Techgage have put together a handy guide to building a Skulltrail system for just $2,500 -- sure, you're not getting those crazy processors for that money, but the specs are still pretty respectable. Techgage priced out a pair of $300 2.3GHz Xeon E5410s, a single NVIDIA 8800GT-based graphics card, 320GB drive, 4GB of RAM and all the chassis bits for $2,520 -- not bad, not bad at all. Grab your screwdrivers and check out all the sample configurations at the read link.
