Allegedly, somebody at Intel had a bit too much spare time on his hands and an urgent itch to build a humble desktop system from components readily available off the shelf .... On the way to the nearest computer store, the same innocent person walked by a grocery store where a robbery was in progress and, in the process, got hit with a bottle of V8, or so the story goes.

Whether it is true or not, what we got from Intel is based on the X5000 chipset, using two 3.0GHz Xeon X5365 quad core CPUs and an entire battery of FBDIMMs clocked at a docile 667 MHz data rate. Arguably not a gaming system, the US$ 3400 in hardware can handle even applications as hog-ful as Microsoft's new Office 2007 suite running under Vista - without crashing. And then there were all kinds of other applications in the general fields of content creation. And Scott Wasson beat me to the punchline: "here's a Hint, it's fast" (or something like that)