Motherboards with lots of PCI slots

[dinki]

My SageTV server is getting old and I'm looking at upgrading. Currently it acts as the server and frontend for my living room tv. I'm thinking of making it a headless server and buying a SageTV HD Theater to act as the frontend.

The problem I'm having is finding a suitable motherboard with enough PCI slots. I'm currently using two PVR150's and a PVR1600. I view both analog and clear QAM through Cox cable (no converter box). What I'd really like to do is build a low power server that is capable of doing the recording duties and running comskip. Of course price is always a concern and I would like to keep things on the low end. Can anyone offer some suggestions?

[evilpenguin]

Rather than looking for something with a lot of PCI slots you might consider just upgrading to a PVR-2250 and picking your MB based on other features.

[Fuzzy]

PCI is really outdated, so most NEW boards are coming with PCI-e. You could opt for replacing your PCI tuners with PCI-e versions, or just go with a fast processor in an older board. You should be able to get an older amd 939 based board/cpu for dirt cheap on ebay, and it will be MUCH more than you would need to run a headless server...

[dinki]

Thanks for the input guys. I was thinking that by going with an older board I could keep my costs down. Do I really need a fast machine to act as a server if it's only function is recording? My impression is that the boards have hardware encoders built in and are just dumping the files to disk. Is that incorrect?

[stanger89]

My server is an Athlon XP 1800, FWIW. If you're just recording and playback exclusively via clients or extenders, you don't need much of a server.

I guess the question is why are you looking to upgrade. If what you have works, I don't see much value. Unless you want to do more on it (comskip etc). I'd either not upgrade, or "go for it" and get a full, new PCIe equipped setup.

[bcjenkins]

Go look at NewEgg and use the More Options feature. You can filter by numbers of slots.

B

[dinki]

We had a nasty bit of weather yesterday and apparently it affected my Sage server. I couldn't get the thing to boot and ended up having to rip it apart to find that some of the ram was having problems. Prior to the storm, I've also noticed that on some reboots, one of my SATA drives is not recognized by the OS. A reboot clears this up. Things are just a bit quirky with this machine.

I'm also contemplating moving the server from it's current location to my home office. The only reason it is where it is now is that it serves as the front end for that TV.

[doc]

I have an Athlon x2 5200 on a giga-byte GA-M61P-S3.

It has 4 PCI and 2 PCI-E. You can still get them over here, not sure about over there.

They're cheap as they're only 10/100mb and the onboard graphics aren't great, but I've had no issues with it at all.

This is only an AM2 mobo. If you want AM2+ or AM3 then finding one with more than 2 PCI's is going to be hard work.

[dadof4]

Look at my Sig. I have a PCI PVR150 and PCI PVR1600 installed and one PCI slot still free on my two week old MB. The MB has HDMI, DVI and VGA outputs also. I got it from TigerDirect.com in in combo with the processor.