Motherboard recommendations

Rosco

Rosco

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Hi every i need a recommendation for a new motherboard. Their old processor and cpu blow in an electrical storm yesterday. They do a lot of 3d modeling(they design kitchens and houses). So i want to put a Intel I7-6700K 4.00 GHz. THe problem is all the motherboard i am looking at have one or no pci slots. They have a few cards(2 minimum 3 preferable) that they need to run from pci. I do not need 3 pci express video ports. Any recommendations would be helpful. I have been looking for close to an hour. Is pci slot a thing of the past now?
 
I'm afraid old-school PCI (33 MHz) is about long gone; certainly doubt you will be able to find anything compatible with a 6700K that has even a single PCI slot. (What do they need PCI slots for, anyway?)
 
Personally, I'd be looking a dual Xeon system board and either dual- or quad-core CPU's. With a decent amount of RAM (memory) this would run circles around most other setups - especially for what they are wanting to do with it.
 
Going to make a number of assumptions... Since they "design" I'm going to guess the PCI cards were used to interface to custom inputs like digitizer boards or custom outputs like pen plotters. They should be able to replace those interfaces with USB models. So find a motherboard with at least 4 USB hubs.

If they squawk about the price ask them if their business continuity insurance will pay for it since the electrical storm would be an act of God. While you're at it sell them a top-line continuous sine UPS so this doesn't happen again. I'm sure they had one on the old system right?
 
OaksLabs said:
The CPU is LGA 1151, correct? I don't recommend MSI motherboards because they are a discount brand and you get what you pay for, but there exists a MSI motherboard with 2 PCI slots here: https://www.amazon.com/MSI-Solution...sr=1-4&keywords=motherboard+pci+slot+lga+1151
Click to expand...

Nice find. not a huge fan of MSI but still a good find.
Metanis said:
Going to make a number of assumptions... Since they "design" I'm going to guess the PCI cards were used to interface to custom inputs like digitizer boards or custom outputs like pen plotters. They should be able to replace those interfaces with USB models. So find a motherboard with at least 4 USB hubs.

If they squawk about the price ask them if their business continuity insurance will pay for it since the electrical storm would be an act of God. While you're at it sell them a top-line continuous sine UPS so this doesn't happen again. I'm sure they had one on the old system right?
Click to expand...

One of the pci cards is a tv tuner/radio card. The other is a serial card for a saw to input the data and have it cut automatically. Price is not the main factor. Very wealthy and knows to spend a little more can make the difference.

Altster said:
Personally, I'd be looking a dual Xeon system board and either dual- or quad-core CPU's. With a decent amount of RAM (memory) this would run circles around most other setups - especially for what they are wanting to do with it.
Click to expand...

This is a good suggestion. He is already using 16gbs of ram but the dual xoen proceesors are a good idea.

ALso i was think just for safety to replace the power supply. No reason to take a chance with it i feel. Is that a good idea with power surge issue on the motherboard?
 
Rosco said:
Hi every i need a recommendation for a new motherboard. Their old processor and cpu blow in an electrical storm yesterday. They do a lot of 3d modeling(they design kitchens and houses). So i want to put a Intel I7-6700K 4.00 GHz. THe problem is all the motherboard i am looking at have one or no pci slots. They have a few cards(2 minimum 3 preferable) that they need to run from pci. I do not need 3 pci express video ports. Any recommendations would be helpful. I have been looking for close to an hour. Is pci slot a thing of the past now?
Click to expand...

Hi Bob, staying cool out there? LOL!!!

At any rate PCI is really hard to find. I have a dental office upgrading, finally, to be HIPAA compliant. They have an old PCI card based digital radiography device which they want to keep in addition to the USB based one they have, x 4 workstations.

My rep at PC Connections found Acer Veriton M4640G which has just one PCI slot, which is all we need. To be honest, by the time you factor in your time spent researching it would probably be better to use someone like that to do your research. I took a quick look at Intel and only found boards with single PCI slots. Looks like they may need to upgrade some of those cards like the TV tuner.
 
I can't speak as to your best option for a processor, but is the software they're using able to multithread effectively or is it primarily single-threaded? That's probably going to be the deciding factor for the best choice.

Does a PCI tuner card even support HDTV? Or are they using it for radio and old analog cameras only (e.g. those old channel 3/channel 4 baby-monitor style cameras)? In any case, for HDTV you can get tuners starting less than $20 (or more depending on features?). I'm not sure what the options would be for radio, I kept hitting a ton of RTL-SDR (software defined radio) stuff that would require appropriate software on the PC.

As for serial, a PCIe card is pretty cheap and not hard to come by. USB serial adapters are also easy to get, but in my limited experience it's been hard to determine what's reliable and what's not - that would likely be worth a few minutes of research.

And frankly, if you're doing all this and it was fried by surge/lightning I'd just build them an entirely new system including cloning the drive across.
 
gikstar said:
I like the HP Z420 workstation for this type of work. http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/pscmisc/vac/us/product_pdfs/Z420_datasheet-highres.pdf
I get them with the high-end 6-core cpu and a Quadro 4000 video card, install more than 16gbs of ram, and dual SSD 's in Raid 1.
These cpu's are faster then a set of dual quad Xeon X5550's
Click to expand...
Good choice. I just had a pair of HP Z400's, both with 5 - 1 TB SATA Hard Drives which could be set in just about any configuration. Nice, fast, computers and heavy (as in weight) as heck!
 
omnichad said:
If you want to get crazy, you can run a PCI card off a PCI to PCIe bridge, but you'll have trouble fitting full-width PCI cards in the case with one - https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Express-Adapter-Card-PEX1PCI1/dp/B0024CV3SA
Click to expand...

I was thinking along the same line of thought. These ones with the ribbon are a bit easier (https://www.amazon.com/PCI-Express-..._SR160,160_&psc=1&refRID=9T23BDQQGTNMCZH12FR1), but still require some custom mounting or a full tower with extra slots below the bottom of the motherboard.
 
Gigabyte H170-HD3 has two PCI slots. Build two computers using them a few weeks ago for a cabinet making company that mostly designs and manufactures kitchens. Needed a PCI slot for a card that operates a CNC router and also meant we could reuse existing paralell port cards that software licensing dongles plug in to.
Just checked and that motherboard isn't listed on Gigabyte's US site (although it is on their Australian site). The similar Z170-HD3 is listed though (http://www.gigabyte.us/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5485) and it also has two PCI slots.
The ASUS H170 PRO/CSM (https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/H170-PRO-CSM/specifications/) also has 2 PCI slots
 
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