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The great motherboard quest

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Can anyone help me find a motherboard that has 3x PCI slots, 2x PCI-e (16x for SLI or Crossfire) and either/or a 1x or 4x PCI-e slot.

This is proving to be an impossible task. :fou:

PS: at this point i don't care if it supports INTEL or AMD, although i would like to run an INTEL Quad Core CPU, maybe even two of them so INTEL is my 1st choice thou.

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The top of the range Asus boards I looked at only comes with 2 PCI slots. Won't that do?

Reply to cfvh600

Yup that is the problem, and if you use 2 vga cards that have 2 slot coolers then you start to lose slots fast.

The reason I need so many slots is this;

I need a sound card;

A graphics card, something fast, I have not decided what yet and i would like to possibly SLI or Crossfire. This might be asking just a little bit to much thou;

A TV-card (something like the all in one wonder pro card) I need this as I want to one watch TV on my PC and do video editing.

Then I was looking at the killer nic for a network card. Now in theory and on paper this thing looks great but in real world performance is it really worth it? So I might scratch this.

The other PCI card is the PhysX Card, I do play a few games that support it so it would be nice.

To add to this I need a SATA II / SAS card to run at least 4 drives in some kind of raid setup for my video editing.

Other drives in the system will be 2x 150 Gb WD Raptor running In raid 0 for games, 2x 74Gb WD Raptors also running in raid 0 for my OS and Virtual PC and a 1TB drive for backups and crap storage, I have not decided which brand yet.

The system will also have 8Gb of RAM 4x 2GB sticks and 3 22” LCD’s.

So as you can see I want my cake and I want to eat it to.

I plan to build this PC bit by bit over the next 6 months.

But I need to start with the motherboard and this is my problem, what board do I get. Let’s not even start talking about bandwidth issues.

Reply to JonnyRock

1) 8800GT = single slot cooler
2) Killer NIC only shows improvement on specific games... not necessarily worth the cost and the pci slot, especially if you dont play those games
3) You can use the second 16x PCI-E for a SATA/SAS controller

Dont forget... More is not always better.

------------------------------ E8400 Wolfdale @ 3.6GHz || ZeroTherm NV120 || 4GB (2x2GB) G.Skill DDR2-800 4-4-4-12 || eVGA nVidia 8800GT || Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 || X-Fi Elite Pro || Samsung Spinpoint 1TB 32MB Cache/SATAII || 250GB WD Caviar SE || Seasonic M12 600W || 24" Dell 2407WFP @
Reply to agentsmith957

Agree with agentsmith ... drop the killer nic they are not worth it and drop the phyx card they provide little fun.

------------------------------ "This thread made me strap on my lolerskates and head for my roflcopter."
Reply to chookman
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