When we first got the Skulltrail machine we had visions of ripping HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs in record times, on the fly transcoding and just chewing through our DivX tests. While one of our media encoding benchmarks showed reasonable gains, for the most part we didn't see scaling beyond four cores with our encoders.
DivX 6.8 with Xmpeg

Our DivX test is the same one we've run in our regular CPU reviews, we're simply encoding a 1080p MPEG-2 file in DivX. We are using an unconstrained profile and enhanced multithreading is enabled.

While the dual QX9775 setup is technically faster than a single QX9770, it's not faster by all that much. Clock speed matters far more here.
Windows Media Encoder 9 x64

Using Windows Media Encoder's advanced video profile we encode a 500MB AVI file, this is the same test we've run in other CPU reviews.

Once again we're not seeing great performance gains from 8 cores here, there's basically no performance advantage to Skulltrail.
x264 Encoding with AutoMKV

Using AutoMKV we compress the same source file we used in our WME test down to 100MB, but with the x264 codec. If we use anything less than the 2 Pass Insane Quality profile we won't see any scaling on 8 cores, but if we enable the highest quality settings we end up with around 80 - 90% CPU utilization across all 8 cores.

Higher quality x264 encodes will benefit from 8 cores, but anything less intensive will show gains similar to what we saw with DivX and WME.
This sounds like a great board and for some-one like me that uses 4x22"monitors and does heaps of multi tasking it sounds perfect and would gladly pay the price asked.
BUT why is such a great board slowed right down by not having DDR3 memory sticks,,,because from what I've read at the momment there is not that much difference with running this and what I have now which is a quad core with DDR3 which runs great but I do overwork it.So bigger would be better.
You would think and I'm sure they already know that it would be common sence to make this board with DDR3 as it is it's only fault as far as I can see.
We will probably see that board come out soon or next in line once they have sold enough of these to satify there egos.
Great board but,,,,just not yet I will be waiting for the next one out which will have to carry DDR3,,,if they want to go forward in thier technolagy.
hnolagy