"Chassis Plans" industrial motherboards...

[unaHm]

Dear all,

After a lot of looking around myself, and also finding the frustration of the lack of "true" PCI slots on motherboards these days, I started to look around on Google for possible solutions.

One company that I found was Chassis Plans, particularly their modular systems.

Here are a couple of links to their products:

http://www.industrial-computer-source.c ... lanes.html
http://www.industrial-computer-source.c ... uters.html

Has anyone ever used these products? Being server-grade I'm sure they're expensive, but for someone who wanted to create a versatile (read insane!) SCOPE PCI computer, it certainly seems like a possible option!

I was reading one of the forum threads regarding the StarTech PCIe to PCI risers/expanders, and I think I've found flexible cable options too: http://www.amfeltec.com/products/x1pcie ... dapter.php, but I know the general consensus on these items is to be cautious.

Any experience, comments or thoughts are appreciated. I think it's going to be a while before I could afford such a base, plus all of the cards that all of the nice people on this forum have for sale (which is torture!), but I do hope to follow this up at some point, especially with anyone's responses!

Kind Regards,

unaHm

[fokas]

Ive been having the same questions myself and my best solutions were two
1. P55 chipset in the form of an ASUS P7P55D-E 2 PCI Slots ...noted by others as a viable solution.
2. C206 chipset with Xeon AND I7 compatability which I use and love ...but only 1 PCI slot ASUS P8B WS
The above are powerful solutions and Native PCI ....
Now just recently intel came up with the B75 Chipset which has Native PCI
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ ... brief.html
and this MB looks promising
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_ ... 55/P8B75V/
So as soon as I can I will look into it ....
RME PCI MADI users seem to also enjoy the company of our problems ...
http://www.rme-audio.de/forum/viewtopic.php?id=12432
The above thread I found very interesting and please note RME SUPPORT comments .

Regards to all
Danny

[Bud Weiser]

Ive been having the same questions myself and my best solutions were two
1. P55 chipset in the form of an ASUS P7P55D-E 2 PCI Slots ...noted by others as a viable solution.
2. C206 chipset with Xeon AND I7 compatability which I use and love ...but only 1 PCI slot ASUS P8B WS
The above are powerful solutions and Native PCI ....
Now just recently intel came up with the B75 Chipset which has Native PCI
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ ... brief.html
and this MB looks promising
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_ ... 55/P8B75V/
So as soon as I can I will look into it ....
RME PCI MADI users seem to also enjoy the company of our problems ...
http://www.rme-audio.de/forum/viewtopic.php?id=12432
The above thread I found very interesting and please note RME SUPPORT comments .

Regards to all
Danny

Look at the IRQ sharing table, manual chapter 2, page 2-12.

PCI #1 shares w/ both the PCIe X16 slots (graphic cards) and RTL 8111E,- so that slot might be unusable at all.
PCI #2 shares w/ PCIe x1_1
PCI #3 shares w/ PCIe X1_2

But, when Scope 6 will be released and supports simultaneous usage of Creamware PCI DSP card and XITE, it would be a nice mobo w/ XITE-1 PCIe card in PCIe X1_1 slot and PCI DSP card in PCI slot #3.

Seems to be a good board for Intel i7 2600K,- and it has a internal parallel LTP port connector which can be activated in BIOS,- offering usage w/ 1 of my MusicQuest (Opcode) 8PortSE 8x8 MIDI interfaces w/ Earthvegaconnections 32Bit or 64Bit Direct Music drivers,- yikes !!!!!!
Only a slot panel w/ the physical LTP connector is needed.

Great find,- thanks !

Bud

[unaHm]

It does appear that a lot of the consumer boards are moving away from native PCI support, going from what I've read on this forum and other resources.

Chassis Plans still support PCI (and even ISA to some extent!) in large numbers, for example this 16 PCI slot beast!

Obiously it would be a bit of an overkill to have 16 15DSP cards in a machine (and I think I read somewhere here that there's a 10 card limit), but using this along with one of the Xeon processor slots it's technically possible.

Unfortunately they don't mention any pricing on their site, so I suppose they'd have to be contacted to find out that information, and they probably only OEM to other vendors.

Still, a cool concept!

[fokas]

Thankfully there are a lot of professionals ,non music, that still need pci support and this has brought back some pci support for now .
I am down from 6 pci cards to 2 .
As soon as I can I will move to test the inexpensive P8B75 because of our policy of one socket for all our Pcs all 775 ,1156 1155 etc ....
there is a B75 Gigabyte board with 4 pci sockets but Xite did have some issues in the past with Giga boards .
The irq sharing may not be an issue at all .
I truly wish I had more time for Research because I really enjoy it !!!!!

Regards to all
Daniel

[garyb]

gigabyte is fine. there were some bios revisions that fixed those old problems...

[dawman]

http://www.bcmcom.com/bcm_product_bc77q.htm

My builder uses this manufacturer as he has PCI cards he refuses to quit using.
The built in Graphics are quite good on the Intel DZ77 he has, which is what I tested my XITE-1 on, and he suggested I wait for this board, but I reminded him I longer have the PCI cards.
But he says they use a top quality PCI Controller.

I wanted to try the PCI-e 3.0 slot to see if the XITE-1 had any performance difference but he was testing a super dooper graphics card but I did get to test the new DZ77 Intel w/ the i7 3770k/XITE-1, and Intel has really got a great new BIOS where everything is very visual and very tweakable too. I am sold on the Intel boards again.

But check out some of the other PCI and ISA built boards. They are quite diverse.

[garyb]

well, it's about time, if these work properly. anytime there's new technology, the early examples don't really work right. it'd be great to be able to recommend 1155 boards to pci users.

[dawman]

I guess the PCI controller isn't on the chipset, and the early models were using the cheapest POS available as no gamer needs PCI 32 slots unless they prefer a nicer Sound card with MIDI, etc.
So it seems these guys realize the need for ancient PCI-X, ISA and PCI 32 bit slots, and have found apporpraite replacement parts.
For example Video buffs I know here are using ancient DFI boards with PCI-X slots and RAID 3 Netcell cards.
Now they upgrade to SSDs as the price per GB has dropped, and RAID 3 is hard to find.
It allows huge chunks of data to be transferred sequentially at speeds better than RAID 0 / 10 or 5.
As a matter of fact many IT guys are forced to keep using older technology as budgets tighten.
And right now the best upgrades you can get are SSDs. The Graphics and CPUs are not a leap in technology, SSDs are quite an advantage if the apps are memory subsystem reliant.

If you want to send me a card, I can have him check it out in late July when I am back in Vegas doing my 1U build. Well as long as I don;t see any RMAs on the Intel forums.
Asus has dozens of guys who have RMA, and then the other dozen are saved by an Asus rep making suggestions to the novice users, or a BIOS fix.
I have no patience for that gamer mentality of buy NOW/NOW/NOW and fix all summer long.
I want the same old Intel stuff that just works...

[igge1]

Looks like I was very lucky to find an AM3 card with three (3) PCI slots. Asus M4A77T, very stable. No silly things like SLI/Crossfire, multiple GPU pointlessness...