Quick question regarding PCIe slots on various boards...

N

needles

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Jun 19, 2005
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Last year I built out a new system with dual 8800GTX cards for SLI-use. Everything is great, but my intention was always to upgrade motherboard and CPU sometime this summer. Now the time has arrived, but I have a question regarding these PCIe slots that these boards have...

Basically, I have two 8800GTX cards and a PCIe 4x SAS controller I wish to use. I have 8 146GB 15K SAS drives I want to use in this new system already purchased, along with a SAS RAID controller.

I guess the problem that I see is that these systems all seem to label the PCIe interfaces as "graphics" interfaces...

I see some boards that advertise dual 16x slots with a third "8x electrical" slot. Will these boards with three PCIe slots let me use my dual 8800GTXs and my SAS controller without any issue?
 
I've used a pci-e lane converter in a low end Dell server with an 8X slot that was "for storage controllers only" to plug in a 16x video card. Worked fine. YMMV, though it should be fine.
 
For your needs, the only board I'd suggest is the eVGA 122-CK-NF68-A1.
 
Regarding the eVGA 122-CK-NF68-A1...

According to the manual it only supports maximum of 4GB of RAM (four slots, 1GB max per slot)? "Hello, 2007? This is 2003. We'd like our motherboard back!"

I can't believe that's the maximum... I have four 4GB DDR2 modules here I was planning to use... :mad:

Can anyone confirm or deny?
 
I believe the max is 8GB. Let me check my manual, I have this board.

EDIT: Yes, it is 8GB.
 
The max for most desktop boards is 8GB for any of the latest mainstream chipsets. Server boards can handle 16GB.
 
Thanks for the clarification, folks! One more question and I think I'm sold... Will the eVGA board work with ECC memory modules?
 
... bump ...

Will the eVGA board in question work with ECC memory modules? (I don't necessarily need ECC to function, but it would be nice to use some ECC memory I already own instead of having to buy new)
 
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