Metspitzer said:
I need to upgrade my mobo.
I would like to use my 18G SCSI drive and a wireless network card.
I think I can get by without adding my USB 2 card but it would be nice
to have it. The case I have doesn't have any external USB ports.
Anyone care to suggest a mobo/cpu combo with at least 3 PCI slots? It
will be used mainly just for Internet, but I don't want it to be
sluggish.
I am not sure about video. I have a Nividia 5500 AGP card I would
like to reuse. I guess the onboard video would be just as good.
Just thinking........the drive is ISA. Man that is gonna suck
Here is a Foxconn board with five PCI slots, but be careful
what you wish for. Picking a board is a compromise taking into
consideration a bunch of things, and if you leap at the first
motherboard you see, you might regret it later. This is the
most PCI slots I could find.
http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/13-186-146-S03?$S640W$
That particular motherboard is only $50.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813186146
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This is my motherboard. It has an AGP slot. It takes a Core2
processor. Unfortunately, the top FSB is FSB1066, so you
cannot profitably use an E8400 for example. The BIOS is
also a bit smelly, and not everything is perfect in the BIOS.
(EIST is disabled, and you cannot enter multiplier values manually.)
It has been a stable board, so I cannot complain about crashing
or memory errors. This board probably has the lowest
memory bandwidth of any board you can buy for Core2
I use 2 x 1GB of DDR2 running at DDR2-533 (max recommended config).
My processor runs at 2.6GHz. I've run my processor at 3.45GHz on this
board, but it wasn't easy, and it was still throwing errors.
At stock it runs fine. I use a five year old AGP card in it.
The PCI Express slot is only x4, so upgrading to PCI Express
video using this motherboard, is "more show than go". The
slot could potentially hold back an expensive card. Since
the two potential video card slots are next to one another,
running two good video cards is out of the question.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157115
I think that motherboard could run one of these. There is another
CPU which is one step faster, but it is not in the Asrock CPU
support charts yet. So you can do better than 2.6GHz now, for a
processor with limited FSB.
Intel Core2 Duo E7500 Wolfdale 2.93GHz FSB1066 3MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W $130
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16819115056
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"Bob", in an earlier post, suggested the M4A78 Pro.
http://support.asus.com/cpusupport/cpusupport.aspx?SLanguage=en-us&model=m4a78 pro
You can fit a 550 in that, and that is the latest hot item at only $99.
AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition Callisto 3.1GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 80W Dual-Core
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103680
*******
You can get add-on cards with PCI Express connectors. That is
a way to make better use of those useless PCI Express slots.
How they do it, is they take a PCI based chip, and place an extra
chip near the edge connector, to convert from PCI Express x1
to PCI bus.
In this picture, the upper chip is a conventional USB2 chip
for PCI bus. The lower chip, converts PCI Express x1 to PCI bus.
The card is about four times as expensive as a regular card.
There are cheaper cards than this one. The cheapest card
is still about $12 more than a regular USB card.
http://c1.neweggimages.com/productimage/15-201-022-05.jpg
There are some native PCI Express chips out there, but not too many.
You can find PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet chips for example. But some
areas have lagged behind, and doing a USB chip with native
PCI Express, isn't in the cards. I think you'll see one
of those, when USB3 comes out
Paul
