Intel has released an eight-core platform targeted at what it calls hard-core gamers – but it will set them back more than £2000 (inc Vat) for the motherboard and processors alone.

The Dual-Socket Extreme Desktop Platform, codenamed Skulltrail, consists of a D5400XS motherboard designed to take two quad-core QX9775 processors and work with NVidia SLI or ATI Crossfire graphics cards that are capable of being yoked together for extra performance.

A single QX9775 costs $1499 (£750) ex Vat and the D5400XS will cost an estimated $649 (£326).

The QX9775 packs 12MB of L2 cache, a 1600MHz system bus and clocks 3.2 GHz.– or faster, because overclocking protection has been removed.

Shervin Kheradpir, director of Intel performance benchmarking, said a PC based on the platform was the fastest ever tested in his lab, reaching a score of 6481 on 3DMark06 CPU and 20,16 on Cinebench* 10 at standard 3.2GHz clocking.