Soldato
Ok. This one's not quite the average "spec me a board" thread. I have a pretty tight requirement for my next rig.
I need:
An X58 board (i7)
With PCI-e slots as follows:
A full sized slot (pci-e 2.0 x16)
An available pci-e x1 slot not blocked by a dual slot card in the above.
A second full sized slot
An available pci-e x4+ slot not blocked by a dual slot card in the above and at least 1 up from the bottom (can't be the bottom slot on the board).
Basically i'm trying to shoe-horn SLI/Crossfire, a Xonar PCI-e soundcard and a perc 5i PCI-e with dual slot cooling into a single board.
Is it possible?
I've seen boards previously (currently have one in fact) with a PCI-e 1x above the 1st video card slot which would make things vastly easier. A second PCI-e 16x 2 slots down from the first would be a pretty natural layout in that case. The kicker is the x4+ 2 slots below this.
If anyone has ideas let me know
The remaining stuff on the board isn't tooooo important, i have pretty kick-ass raid and sound available. USB/firewire etc etc isn't a biggie, I can think of no other requirements I have, just VERY rigid on the PCI-e slot layout.
The Asus supercomputer/WS board obviously does the above, i'm after something a little more realistic price wise
Oh, as a last thing, it needs to be more than 36 lane PCI-e board (2x16's for video, 1 for the sound, 4 for the raid card. I think i'll live with something slightly underperforming if needed tho (so this last bits a kind of "would be nice" Option.
At some point i'm gonna retire the raid card and go SSD but will be a while I think so need to keep everything as above for now.
To give a better visual idea what I mean. Take the below board:
And switch the position of the bottom 2 pci/pci-e pairs.
It would go (from left to right) PCI, PCI-e 16x, PCI, PCI-e 16x, PCI-e 1x, PCI-e 16x, PCI-e 1x
I need:
An X58 board (i7)
With PCI-e slots as follows:
A full sized slot (pci-e 2.0 x16)
An available pci-e x1 slot not blocked by a dual slot card in the above.
A second full sized slot
An available pci-e x4+ slot not blocked by a dual slot card in the above and at least 1 up from the bottom (can't be the bottom slot on the board).
Basically i'm trying to shoe-horn SLI/Crossfire, a Xonar PCI-e soundcard and a perc 5i PCI-e with dual slot cooling into a single board.
Is it possible?
I've seen boards previously (currently have one in fact) with a PCI-e 1x above the 1st video card slot which would make things vastly easier. A second PCI-e 16x 2 slots down from the first would be a pretty natural layout in that case. The kicker is the x4+ 2 slots below this.
If anyone has ideas let me know
The remaining stuff on the board isn't tooooo important, i have pretty kick-ass raid and sound available. USB/firewire etc etc isn't a biggie, I can think of no other requirements I have, just VERY rigid on the PCI-e slot layout.
The Asus supercomputer/WS board obviously does the above, i'm after something a little more realistic price wise
Oh, as a last thing, it needs to be more than 36 lane PCI-e board (2x16's for video, 1 for the sound, 4 for the raid card. I think i'll live with something slightly underperforming if needed tho (so this last bits a kind of "would be nice" Option.
At some point i'm gonna retire the raid card and go SSD but will be a while I think so need to keep everything as above for now.
To give a better visual idea what I mean. Take the below board:
And switch the position of the bottom 2 pci/pci-e pairs.
It would go (from left to right) PCI, PCI-e 16x, PCI, PCI-e 16x, PCI-e 1x, PCI-e 16x, PCI-e 1x
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