Motherboard with 8 PCI slots???

[zeddic]

Anybody know of an off the shelf motherboard that has 8 PCI slots? I've searched all over and only found custom built ones with passive/active backplanes and single board CPU cards. A friend of mine is trying to build a PC with a high end PCI sound card/mixer and he asked me about off the shelf boards that have 8 PCI slots. Do they even make them?

thanks

 

[Peter]

8 PCI slots no can do, with standard chipsets, since the electrical bus load would be way too high. Besides, standard case form factors let you have no more than 7 slots total, of any kind.

Best it gets - again with standard equipment - is six PCI slots plus one AGP. Industrialized PC racks might use baseboards with PCI-to-PCI bridges that offer loads more slots. I wouldn't expect latency sensitive stuff like pro sound cards to work well on those, though.

 

[Jhhnn]

Why would he need 8 pci slots? Given the higher degree of integration with newer boards, the need for slots is going down, not up...

onboard lan, even gigabit lan, onboard sata and scsi controllers, onboard video, onboard firewire, in a few instances....

Have your friend enumerate the reasons he wants such a board, and a way around it can probably be found, easily...

 

[Algere]

I have 8 ...

 

[batmanuel]

Even if you find one that has eight slots, it's doubtful you could populate all of those slots and not have any resource conflicts. Like Jhhnn said, you can probably figure out a way to get a lot of what he needs onboard, so your need for extra slots is reduced. On my system, I've got 6 USB 2 ports, two Firewire ports, a pair of 10/100 ethernet ports, Dolby Digital 5.1 audio with a coax S/PDIF in and out, and two channel Serial ATA RAID and I'm not using using a single PCI slot for any of it (just have one populated with an analog video capture card). There's gotta be a way to do everything he wants with less than eight slots.