Vigor Colossus: super-expensive eight-core system is not for every power user.(REVIEWS: DESKTOPS)(Product/service evaluation)

VIGOR'S $7,176 COLOSSUS is the first desktop we've seen that's powered by Intel's Skulltrail platform. Aimed at the most elite (and richest) of power users, it consists of an Extended ATX motherboard bearing not one but two of Intel's toppest-of-the-line (and most expensive) processors, the 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9775 (each overclocked to 3.6GHz).

In addition to those processors, the Colossus also boasts 4GB of Fully Buffered (FB) DDR2 RAM, two 750GB hard drives (in a RAID Level 0 configuration, for a total of 1.5 terabytes of storage space), two ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2 video cards set up in a CrossFireX configuration, and an eight-channel sound card.

But the Colossus is one of the rare high-performance, high-cost PCs we've seen that's not necessarily the computer for brick-splitting gaming. Despite all the power under the hood, you won't detect most mammoth performance increases unless you're running the right kind of software: multithreaded applications written to take advantage of multiple CPU cores. We saw astounding results in some of our benchmark tests, but in others, less-expensive (and ...