Not enoug PCI slot for TV tuners? – this might help

[Fonceur]

Originally Posted by mapleleaf

I would love to see Snapstream to come up with this as well

I had someone suggest support for multiple servers in BTV-Negociator, but that gets messy fast...

[imnee]

I just bought the board below. It has 3 PCI slots and pretty decent onboard sound, GB lan, & Raid. Don't knock the PCIx slots. The PCIx video cards rock. I bought a dual core CPU and a nice silent Nvidia card and my server runs extremely well. I have ATI 650 tuners three tuners as well.

ECS nForce 570 SLIT-A v5.1 Socket 775

Originally Posted by mapleleaf

I am planning to retire my 3 months old BTV server with newly purchased older model of MOBO that came with 5 PCI slots and AGP (wanted to use my old hardware), because BTV begun to tax my CPU so much lately that I am considering upgrade to newer MOBO with dual core support… Lack of PCI slots for my existing tuners really pisses me off. Most of new boards come with useless PCI-x 1 slots and 2 – 3 PCI slots only. That is not enough for my 3 tuners + sound card which is bare minimum I need to get in my box (not mentioning my RAID5 and second NIC card I have decided to sacrifice already).
After some searching, I have found this:
http://www.deca-tech.com/MG-P19014-WH.html PCIe to PCI×4 Expansion Box
and also this:
http://www.mobl.com/expansion/produc...lot/index.html
Firs option is about $120 while second is supposed to be professional solution for about $1500.
Obviously, I am leaning towards first option... Any comments?

[collin]

I recently did a similar search and came up with this motherboard as the best way to get modern cpu and ram capabilities with adequate ports and slots for HTPC use:

BIOSTAR NF4UAM2G Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813138041

Socket AM2 for AMD X2 dual core
4 DDR2 slots
4 SATA for all those extra drives
2 PATA for one optical and more PATA drives
4 PCI for those older tuner cards
2 PCI-E x1 for newer tuner cards
1 PCI-E x16 for current video cards
1 Gigabit Ethernet for fast network streaming
4 USB on back, 3 headers on the board

the downside is only 1 CPU fan header and 1 system fan header. I have like 4 system fans in my Silverstone case.

[Joe The Dude]

I think that you may have linked to the wrong motherboard.

The onle you linked to has 100 Megabit LAN, not 1Gb LAN.

Also, the SATA Ports are very close to the PCI Ports.
I'd imagine it's be difficult to plug in SATA Drives if all four PCI Slots had a PVR-500 in them.

My suggestion is the MSI 945P Neo 3-F Motherboard.
I'm currently using it im my BTV Server, and it's rock solid.
It has:
Intel Core2Duo Support (LGA 775),
Four DDRII 667 Slots,
One CPU Fan Header,
Two 3-Pin Fan Headers,
Four PCI Slots,
One PCI Evpress x16 Slot,
One PCI Evpress x1 Slot,
Onboard Gigabit LAN,
Onboard Audio,
Four Rear USB 2.0 Ports,
Two Internal USB Port Headers (each internal header is 2 USB Ports, for a total of 4 External and 4 Internal),
One Rear Serial/COM Port,
One Internal Serial/COM Port Header,
Four SATAII Ports,
but only one IDE Port.
Oh, and best of all, it runs stable with my setup.


Here's a link to a thread I made about it: Do you have an MSI 945P Neo 3-F Motherboard?

By the way, where can I purchase the following?
http://www.deca-tech.com/MG-P19014-WH.html PCIe to PCI×4 Expansion Box. You said it's $120.
I searched far and wide for it (well, I googled it for about two hours) and couldn't find it for sale.

[collin]

Originally Posted by Joe The Dude

I think that you may have linked to the wrong motherboard.

The onle you linked to has 100 Megabit LAN, not 1Gb LAN.

Also, the SATA Ports are very close to the PCI Ports.
I'd imagine it's be difficult to plug in SATA Drives if all four PCI Slots had a PVR-500 in them.

My suggestion is the MSI 945P Neo 3-F Motherboard.
I'm currently using it im my BTV Server, and it's rock solid.
It has:
Intel Core2Duo Support (LGA 775),
Four DDRII 667 Slots,
One CPU Fan Header,
Two 3-Pin Fan Headers,
Four PCI Slots,
One PCI Evpress x16 Slot,
One PCI Evpress x1 Slot,
Onboard Gigabit LAN,
Onboard Audio,
Four Rear USB 2.0 Ports,
Two Internal USB Port Headers (each internal header is 2 USB Ports, for a total of 4 External and 4 Internal),
One Rear Serial/COM Port,
One Internal Serial/COM Port Header,
Four SATAII Ports,
but only one IDE Port.
Oh, and best of all, it runs stable with my setup.


Here's a link to a thread I made about it: Do you have an MSI 945P Neo 3-F Motherboard?

By the way, where can I purchase the following?
http://www.deca-tech.com/MG-P19014-WH.html PCIe to PCI×4 Expansion Box. You said it's $120.
I searched far and wide for it (well, I googled it for about two hours) and couldn't find it for sale.

I checked the Newegg site and it links to the right MB that I was talking about. Newegg lists 10/100/1000 LAN and I double checked it on the Biostar site which also says it has gigabit.
http://www.biostar.com.tw/products/m...me=NF4U%20AM2G

I think I considered your MB but since none of the Intel chipset MB's have more than one PATA IDE port, I eliminated them since I have an optical and 3 large PATA's that I would like to keep using. You're right about the placement of the SATA ports but I was able to arrange my cards so that it fits ok (2 Kworld ATSC-110 short PCI cards that don't reach the SATA) and 2 PVR-500's in the other 2 slots. Plus I thought the additional PCI-E x1 might come in handy once tuner cards for those become more common.

Another item to note may be the 945 chipset's RAM support. I have a 945 MB with a E6600 C2D CPU for a desktop machine and it only supports 3.15GB of RAM maximum due to address mapping issues with the 945 chipset.

Anyhow, I think the Biostar I listed is the best HTPC choice for AMD CPUs and your MSI may be the best for Intel CPUs.

[Joe The Dude]

Originally Posted by collin

I think the Biostar I listed is the best HTPC choice for AMD CPUs and your MSI may be the best for Intel CPUs.

Agreed.

[mapleleaf]

Originally Posted by Joe The Dude

By the way, where can I purchase the following?
http://www.deca-tech.com/MG-P19014-WH.html PCIe to PCI×4 Expansion Box. You said it's $120.
I searched far and wide for it (well, I googled it for about two hours) and couldn't find it for sale.

I don't think that you can get it in US, you will need to order from overseas. The first time I read about it, was on some foreign website and they've mentioned $120. Many online stores offer it, these ones are just an example and it is quite a bit more expensive, about $200, therefore, I think that I will get a new mobo instead:
http://translate.google.com/translat...3DtMX%26sa%3DG
http://translate.google.com/translat...ial%26hs%3DkuW
http://translate.google.com/translat...ial%26hs%3DkuW
http://translate.google.com/translat...ial%26hs%3DkuW
http://translate.google.com/translat...ial%26hs%3DkuW

[Bigbird999]

Is this it? http://www.mobl.com/expansion/produc...ion/index.html

Don't know about pricing but lots of USA resellers.

BB

[mapleleaf]

It is not exactly same thing, your is 1 PCI to many PCI slots. I have no idea if one PCI slot could provide enough bandwidth for more than 3-4 analog tuners. The expansion box I have found is PCIx to 4 PCI and that might work better. Actually, I've posted link to the same company that you did in my first post and they have PCIx to PCI as well, however, their option is about $1500.

[Joe The Dude]

Originally Posted by mapleleaf

It is not exactly same thing, your is 1 PCI to many PCI slots. I have no idea if one PCI slot could provide enough bandwidth for more than 3-4 analog tuners. The expansion box I have found is PCIx to 4 PCI and that might work better. Actually, I've posted link to the same company that you did in my first post and they have PCIx to PCI as well, however, their option is about $1,500.

Yeah, when I saw the $1,500 price tag on the second option, I nearly choked on my soda!


For half of that price ($750), I could just build another 4-PCI Slot BTV Server, and that would include the cost of two hard drives, not that I plan to do that.

I wonder why they are charging $1,500 for their product.
They need to drop at least $1,000 off of the price before I'd even consiter it.
Does it really cost that much to make it, or do you think that they're just price gouging?

[mapleleaf]

I would much rather build number of BTV servers if Snapstream supported this kind of setup. The problem is that scheduling recordings on multiple servers and viewing from BTVLink would be quite difficult right now, definitely not very convenient.

The cost of PCIx to PCI box from Magma is probably so high because they seem to orient themselves towards professional solutions and in that business sphere everything seems to be overpriced…

[mtmsol]

Just get the Asus Commando board:
http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?l...80&modelmenu=1
It has 4 PCI slots, 2 16X PCI-e, dual GB LAN on board and high quality on board audio (DTS compliant with digital out).

[doubledose]

I have just purchased one of these for my system. I don't have it installed yet. I think it is over kill for a BYTV server, But I think it will be a good board for the system. I am now looking at video cards for this upgrade.

[massey4]

Originally Posted by Joe The Dude

I've never had any luck with motherboards that have VIA Chipsets, but I hope that's not the case for you as well.


Here's a link to ECS PT890T-A Motherboard on NewEgg:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813135044
They have working pictures of it, and more specific details.
It's onboard LAN is 100 Megabit, It has 2 IDE ports, and 2 SATA I (150) ports.
It supports DDRII 533, but not DDRII 667.
It doesn't support Dual Channel Memory Mode.

Be sure to let us know how it works out for you.

Well, the system has been up and running for some time now and I have been meaning to respond to this. For the most part, the system has been performing flawlessly. When I first set it up, I did so without using the normal BTV "shows" folder; I instead pointed it at just the "D" drive. Things worked fine for a while but sometime after that, when starting a recording during playback of another recording, BTV got into a 1/2-second stutter loop that required a hard reboot to break. Then it happened a second time. That 2nd time I also got a "no default video folder had been identified" error message. I subsequently identified the normal/default "shows" folder location on the "C" drive as a secondary usage location and also set my page file to twice my memory size rather than allowing it to dynamically grow, if needed. The problem has not been seen again (and the secondary "shows" location has never yet been used except for perhaps keeping BTV happy and out of trouble). The other problem I sometimes see is I infrequently get a "no data received from the video capture device" error message when starting recording. It is very infrequent, I believe it is associated with the 2 channels on the Nvidia DualTV card and every time I try to reproduce it by starting 4 recordings at once, everything works as it should. As far as I can tell, the ECS motherboard is doing everything it should do. This system will even hibernate (and later re-awaken) like it is supposed to as long as I remember to close the BTV user interface when I'm done watching for the evening. It won't wake on USB/keyboard/mouse activity so the Firefly remote is useless for starting it up, a trip to the PC is necessary, but that is truly the only shortcoming I've found of this motherboard.