Obsolete the Day After You Buy It

So I've been waiting many many months for word on an Intel Skulltrail II motherboard. It figures that the week after I buy the Intel S5520SC motherboard I hear about the Skulltrail II

• Rumor says Intel Skulltrail 2 in the works
• Intel "Skulltrail 2" is based upon 8-Core Nehalem-EX

Of course there are no real specifications out yet, but it's interesting that they are planning it with the new 8-Core Nehalem-EX - that's 32 threads folks! We'll be lucky to see the Nehalem-EX before 2010.

I'm really torn because the Skulltrail II was what I really wanted, but then do I want to wait another 6 months? Also, the Skulltrail I was a terrible motherboard - I don't know what Intel was smoking when they came up with that. They got so much criticism I can only hope they learned their lesson and won't be so stupid next time. I know deep down in my heart I could design a really cool Skulltrail II - probably better than Intel.

So where does that leave me? If the Skulltrail II incorporates an ICH10 compatible RAID controller I would be able to swap out my S5520SC with a Skulltrail II and preserve my RAID file system. Hopefully there would be a spare 4/8 lane PCI Express slot for my FusionIO ioBoard. Of course I would have to by new processors - the EX ones. I suspect the EX processors will not be socket compatible with the Xeon 5580s, so I can't just drop them into my S5520SC motherboard.

What else does Skulltrail II get you? Well probably the ability to overclock the processors. It is well known the Nehalem processors can easily handle 4 GHz or better.

Anyway - so many if's right now. My current plan is to proceed with building Gemini and 6 months to a year from now if the Skulltrail II is appropriate, maybe we'll see Gemini on steroids :-)