Maximum PC

They make them for servers, why not for gaming systems? With 64bit OS's and 8GB of RAM becoming more and more common I would think it would make sense. Back in the late 90's I built an Abit BH6 dual celeron system. I'm surprised that kind of tech hasnt resurfaced. Also why dont motherboard mfg's solder ram right onto the motherboard, maybe 8GB or so to use as a RAM Drive? In the age of $400 motherboards I think these would be cool features.

They do... its called EVGA's SR-2 that costs $600 and only can use capable Xeon processors; typically very expensive and meant for 2P, 4P and 8P operations. It's been rumored that EVGA is working on a 2P lga 2011 socket, but no real info is out on it or if it's actually true.

Honestly, its kinda worthless for gaming since most games can't even utilize more than 2 or 4 threads, so why add the cost of an expensive motherboard with another expensive cpu? A lot of the newer gen games are much more heavily GPU demanding than CPU. BF3 is a good example for this. You can hit the same frames running a gtx 580 on a cheap i3 all the way up to the more expensive i7's. It does get more important for CPU power when you start running multi-card solutions like triple or quad SLI setups, but they still will hit a wall of scalability first.

Motherboard's don't solder ram onto a motherboard unless space is a tight squeeze and they have the necessary board space for them. You only see this with small laptops like ultrabooks or netbooks. Other devices like nettops will have some ram soldered on the board as well. For a standard ATX, microATX, miniATX and ITX boards, it's still cheaper to put the slots in and use the DDR standards for comparability for ram. Soldering ram would only complicate designs for something very trivial. Not to mention 8GB chips would take a lot of vital surface space since they are surface mount only components.

And since RAM is cheap, why not put your own 8GB sticks in for a ram drive if you are so inclined towards that feature. The feature is beyond most common people's needs or wants; plus its volatile so not exactly the best choice for data security.

Don't remember Intel Skulltrail? I'm pretty sure it was in a Dream Machines as well.

But the best you can do now is having a hexacore or octocore.

actually you can get the SR-2 out of B stock at EVGA for 399.00

Still 398 more than I'm willing to spend.

I'd look for the "fell off the truck, went through a field of mud, crashed through your grandmothers cabin and used as a dog's plate back in China for three days." deal... lol

I remember reading in an old MaxPC that the necessity of dual cpu motherboards for consumer use died when AMD and Intel brought out dual-core processors. Two processors in one package meant that two discrete cpus were no longer needed.

The Pentium D was the worst adaptation of Intel's first dual core cpu. Just wanna say it cause I still can't believe I built one, nor could I believe I fenced it 3 months later for a profit!

Biggest reason: Cost. Not just to the consumer, but to the manufacturer as well. And as other people mentioned, not many games take advantage of multiple cores, and you also don't need any more than 8GB of RAM anyway since most games aren't 64-bit (meaning at best, they only chew through 4GB)

Personally, I would rather not stick with a 3ghz P4 w/hyperthreading.

Hey, those P4's weren't bad; I still have mine and use daily. Still speedy for office apps and web browsing. And I went with a couple C2D machines right after Pentium D, but damn did those cpu's eat through some power and really weren't that much more powerful than my OC P4 in single threaded apps at the time.