While it's very easy for folks who work in the tech industry to become very apathetic towards a trade show like CES, it still always seems to present stuff that's interesting, odd and downright news-worthy. To that end, the first day of CES seemed to have all of those things going for it.

First up is Intel and the 8-Core system it had on demo - this PC was a serious monstrosity - 2 quad-core XEON CPUs running at 3GHz each. The point of this system wasn't so much to say that Intel will be releasing a Core2Duo variant of this setup for desktop users but to show what's possible, right now, if you go the XEON route and still want to play games or run more professional applications such as 3D Studio and Adobe Premiere.

We spent a bit of time with an Intel spokesman who took his own time - and a healthy Intel budget - and quite literally went out and bought all the components inside the box - a dual-CPU motherboard, a GeForce 8800GTX and the twin 2.8GHz Xeon CPUs; clocking each one to 3.0GHz.

Running 3DMark on this system proved to quite impressive to see - an overall CPU score of 6189 left quite an impression with this editor that an 8-core system may be the ticket to ride for the overall kick-ass gaming experience. Okay - back to reality - a sytem like this is still a bit costly for most folks and the motherboards out there that support dual XEONs may not have all the features one would be looking for (like SLI support for example). No, this system was put together for those who want the ultimate bragging rights at the next LAN party they attend or who can really use a setup like this as a professional workstation.

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