Found Motherboard with 5 PCI Slots ($80 / Intel 775 / P35)

[ChuckSchick]

I just wanted to throw this information on the board as I've seen multiple posts about the travails of finding a motherboard with adequate PCI slots for hardware tuners.

I'll be building a headless server with this over the coming weekend. I'll update the post if I find any problems, otherwise this looks like an ideal server mobo.

GIGABYTE GA-P35-S3G

BTW, anyone know if I need to install the usual assortment of codecs to a headless server driving a client and a couple HD100's ? (I don't see why if there isn't any transcoding going on, or is there?)

[heffneil]

Too bad it isn't dual proc

Neil

[CPA]

Originally Posted by heffneil

Too bad it isn't dual proc

Neil

You mean dual core? It is and quad as well.

[Lucas]

Good Find!

[Thorbaden]

would this mobo be able to run 5 tuners at the same time? i always thought regular pci slots shared bandwidth with eachother so would it be wise to run 5 tuners?

if it was pci-e that would be a different story but.....

[Humanzee]

I need firewire for my HD recording, and I currently have 7 hard drives in my server, of course its dieing so I'm also looking for a replacement. I found this Asus board that has 3 pci, 7 SATA, and Firewire. My server will have a screen for the kitchen so the S/PDIF and SLI output may not be of any use to you.

I have three pci tuners at the moment, one USB, and one Firewire. Of those five, one is a dual tuner so I have the capability of 6. In the new board it would essentially be the same. When component capture is widely available ill probably make some changes. But in reality, I only ever have 4 tuners hooked up because my signal quality degrades with too many splits. Hardly ever a recording conflict anyway though. 5 pci is nice but I think its a trade off where as you don't get the option of an extra PCIe1x slot and PCIe16x slot for future tech. Having the capacity for 5 legacy PCI cards is overkill on the old standard if you ask me. Spacing, really? Many modern boards alternate their slot layout from PCI to PCIe so you could space out 3 PCI tuner cards anyway.

I started looking for boards with at least 4 PCI slots, and all the extra's that I need, but they don't exist. Then I realized that in the 4 years I have been running my current server the only expansion ever needed was added storage. Hence the 7 hard drives required an SATA expansion card and another free PCI slot. When I built that server there was no such thing as PCIe or SATA 3gbs so I used a 4 port SATA expansion card, and I'm not super impressed with it. Its fine if you are accessing one drive at a time, but when you access more than one, I.e. copying/moving files, it really slows down. I think this is because all those drives are now piped through the band width of one PCI slot.

For me the 7 SATA 3Gbs plus the back panel eSATA for future upgrades is a huge plus. Optical drives are going sata now also and price per GB for storage is still going down so if anything Ill be adding Blueray and storage in the future. I'll probably drop from 7 drives down to 2 larger drives plus one OS drive but these extra ports allow me to expand in the one area that I am likely to expand in.

AMD vs. Intel is up to you, I have both, AMD is the most bang for the buck at the moment.

You are clearly already vested with the Gigabyte board since you are building your server rig this weekend, so I'm not trying to dissuade you or anything. It will work out fine and open PCI slots equals more options, but I thought I'd just share some perspective for others out there pondering the options. Everything comes in USB 2.0 these days, so you'll likely never be totally tied up by your motherboard anyway.

[Lucas]

Originally Posted by Thorbaden

would this mobo be able to run 5 tuners at the same time? i always thought regular pci slots shared bandwidth with eachother so would it be wise to run 5 tuners?

if it was pci-e that would be a different story but.....

I haven't had any issues running 5 PCI tuners in my current server.

[paulbeers]

Originally Posted by Thorbaden

ok i was just remembering a past experience with an old mobo. had an agp graphics card and then the last pci slot would not work becuase of bandwidth (would constantly lock up if there was a pci card in there)

The bandwidth of hardware encoders (software encoders are another issue all together) is very minimal. Even an HD stream uses less than 3MB/s. With the PCI bus, you have approximately 132MB/s so it would take 44 HD Streams to fill the bus completely (of course that is if you had nothing else on it). The real issue with PCI bus is when you add Raid cards and/or GB ethernet cards. Those will fill your PCI bus and were really the driving reasons behind the advent of PCIE.

My file server (old AMD Athlon XP 2200+) has 5 PCI slots with a GB Ethernet Card and 2 basic Raid cards that absolutely cause nightmares for the bus. Oh well. Good news is that its main reason is to stream audio and video which takes very little bandwidth (just stinks trying to transfer files onto it).

Edit: Good god this time issue with the forums is driving me insane....

Edit2: I also agree with humanzee, I would much rather have a large amount of SATA ports than PCI. Dual tuner cards reduce the need for large quanitities of PCI cards and external tuners reduce even further. When I redid my server last year I ended up just getting rid of my single tuner cards and added an HDHomerun....Now I only have 3 "devices" with 2 tuners each (2 internal dual tuner and 1 external HDHomerun).

[heffe2001]

Originally Posted by Humanzee

I need firewire for my HD recording, and I currently have 7 hard drives in my server, of course its dieing so I'm also looking for a replacement. I found this Asus board that has 3 pci, 7 SATA, and Firewire. My server will have a screen for the kitchen so the S/PDIF and SLI output may not be of any use to you.

I'm using this same board now as my Sage server, and so far, it's working beautifully. I've currently got 6 SATA drives in it, 2x PCI tuners, and 2x PCIE M780 tuners, along with a HDHR for additional QAM tuners. I've had absolutely NO issues with the board (and it was even an open box from Newegg, saved some decent coin there), has plenty of ports, and the Esata on the back is a most definite plus (I'll end up putting an external storage case connected to that at some point, just don't quite need it yet).

[Thorbaden]

ok i was just remembering a past experience with an old mobo. had an agp graphics card and then the last pci slot would not work becuase of bandwidth (would constantly lock up if there was a pci card in there)

[ChuckSchick]

Actually, I'm not using 5 tuners at this time, but what 5 pci slots does do is give you a bit of room between the tuners. I'm not sure how much this matters, but I've never been comfortable with the airflow around the tuner cards, which are a pretty tight fit. With 3 tuners in, I've got an empty slot between them.

Onboard video and >4 SATA ports would be icing on the cake, but a cheap vid card and (if ever needed) a pci to sata controller card would make up for this.