Motherboard with the highest number of PCI-Express slots

[Luca Villa]

I love PCI-Express and would like to find the motherboard with the
highest number of PCI-Express slots.
Are there motherboards, for Intel Quad-Core Extreme CPUs, with more
than 3 PCI-Express slots?

 

[Paul]

I love PCI-Express and would like to find the motherboard with the
highest number of PCI-Express slots.
Are there motherboards, for Intel Quad-Core Extreme CPUs, with more
than 3 PCI-Express slots?

680i supports lots of PCI Express lanes, but it cannot
take 45nm quad processors at the moment. Check the MSI
CPU support list, to see what they've tested this with.

MSI P6N Diamond LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130080

If you go for an Intel chipset, they handle 45nm processors OK,
but they don't do SLI (Crossfire might work). And generally
there are fewer lanes to work with. Which means fewer useful
slots.

P5E64 WS Professional "4 x PCIe x16 (@ x16, x16, x4, x4)"
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=1935&l1=3&l2=11&l3=572&l4=0

When 780i ships, that will handle 45nm processors. You'd have
to wait for a board like that MSI board, to get four large
PCI Express slots. Note that the bandwidth is still constrained,
by the three chip bridge architecture.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3180

The AMD 4x4 was also a pretty capable product, but AFAIK, the
intended processors have been discontinued. You may still be
able to buy a pair of processors for one of these, but AMD
isn't making any more new ones (i.e. FX74). There are probably
other socket 1207 processors that might work, not really sure.
This had four video card slots.

L1N64-SLI WS
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?modelmenu=2&model=1530&l1=3&l2=82&l3=489&l4=0

Paul

 

[Paul]

I love PCI-Express and would like to find the motherboard with the
highest number of PCI-Express slots.
Are there motherboards, for Intel Quad-Core Extreme CPUs, with more
than 3 PCI-Express slots?

This board has four PCI Express x16 slots, but doesn't have the
nice spacing of the P6N Diamond. The weird spacing is because of the
need to place the Nforce 200 bridge chip. Two of the PCI Express x16
slots are only suited to single width cards, so those slots will need
a "slim" card, rather than some of the fat two slot wide ones.
This board is supposed to support 45nm Intel processors.

P7N Diamond
http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=newsdesc&news_no=572

It isn't shipping yet, at least I don't see it listed.

Paul

 

[Luca Villa]

This board has four PCI Express x16 slots, but doesn't have the
nice spacing of the P6N Diamond. The weird spacing is because of the
need to place the Nforce 200 bridge chip. Two of the PCI Express x16
slots are only suited to single width cards, so those slots will need
a "slim" card, rather than some of the fat two slot wide ones.
This board is supposed to support 45nm Intel processors.

P7N Diamond
http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=newsdesc&news_no=572

It isn't shipping yet, at least I don't see it listed.

Thank you very much Paul for your help!
Since I can't find the P7N on the market I think I'll take the P6N
Diamond, that has 4 PCIe x16 + 1 PCIe x1 slots.
My only concern is that they are only v1.0a compliant, not 2.0, but
it's not a big concern because the 2.0 is still very new...

Luca