If you're considering investing in a Skulltrail system, we suggest you make sure you have some financial reserves to cover your power bill. Keeping the system running for eight hours a day will cost upwards towards $100 over the course of a year. To give you a reference point, the single-socket system will only set you back by about half that much.

Overclocking doesn't help either, which can run up your bill to close to $200. If you put together a quad-SLI configuration, the energy cost would be so high that you could buy a new high-end graphics card for the same price - every year!.

Left running around the clock, the energy bill for the system could rise to more than $400.

Due to the broken Speed Step feature on our review board, the cost of operation when idle would be over $30 a year higher than the fastest single-socket quad-core processor. Compare Prices on Intel Core 2 Processors It gets worse - the gap practically doubles when the Skulltrail is overclocked.

Over the course of a year, the system could cost close to $300 if left running 24/7.

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