Adobe Photoshop CS3

To measure performance in Adobe's Photoshop CS3 we turned to the Retouch Artists CS3 benchmark. The test cycles through a handful of commonly used filters and is timed manually. We ran the benchmark at its default settings.

While we see a performance gain with 8 cores, it's mostly erased by the high latency of the platform's FBD memory subsystem. Two QX9775s on Skulltrail are faster than one, but slower than a single QX9770 on a desktop motherboard.
Valve Map Compilation

Valve supplied us with their VRAD map compilation tool to measure the performance of compiling Source engine maps. We ran two builds simultaneously to fully stress all 8 cores:

As you'd expect, highly parallelizable tasks work very well on Skulltrail. The performance we're seeing here is only attainable by adding more cores, clock speed alone can't do it.
Valve Particle Benchmark

Particle systems are an important aspect of CPU performance in 3D games, although this benchmark does overstate its importance a bit. However, it does give one aspect of how more cores can be used in future games.

The performance gains are far more marginal here, we're looking at about 14% from 4 to 8 cores.
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