Intel's next-generation high-performance Skulltrail platform arrived today, ending months of speculation on what its features, performance, and capabilities would be. Intel was definitely arming for bear when it created Skulltrail—the dual-socket LGA771 D5400XS is built around Intel's workstation-class 5400 MCH northbridge and 6321ESB ICH southbridge, carries four PCIe 1.1 x16 slots, four 240-pin FB-DIMM slots (maximum of 16GB of memory installed), integrated eight-channel audio with Dolby Home Theater capability, and support for both ATI and NVIDIA multi-GPU configurations.

The D5400XS also offers an impressive (if not earth-shattering) amount of connectivity options. The board supports up to 10 USB 2.0 headers, two FireWire (presumably IEEE 1394a) ports, six SATA-II drives, two eSATA ports, a single ATA port, and one gigE connector. The only missing feature that might have been nice on Skulltrail, given its workstation orientation, is a second Ethernet port. Then again, if you can afford a Skulltrail-based system, you can afford an extra gigabit Ethernet card, so it's probably not an issue.