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Motherboards With More Slots Sought
cheros writes: "I would be interested if anyone knows of motherboards which have more than the usual 4/5 PCI slots on them (and maybe with one or two ISA slots as well). Extenders would be interesting too, but I can imagine bus timings getting in the way of anything with leads leaving the case. I'm about to build another system (with a 1.3GHz AMD as main processor), and when I start listing the toys I want in it I end up being short of slots. Just add up: sound, SCSI, NIC, TV, FireWire, serial card for extra serial ports (Linux and VT100 - it rocks ;-). And I have this old ISA card I built a while ago with 8 relays - that's no longer usable so I might need another slot for a digital I/O card. Anyone? Pleeze?"
No idea how well these work - I believe this was the model I saw being hawked at Siggraph, and the salesman had no idea about latencies, cable lengths or similar. But he suuuuuure wanted to sell me one today!
Have more than one computer...
Seriously - this is the cheapest solution you are going to find.
Don't try to do everything with one box, have multiple boxes - set up a file server, with lots of disk space, and maybe two or three CD-ROM drives (or, for fun, get a nice SCSI burner and two or three plextor 6 disk changers).
Then, build a media box - put the TV, MP3, DVD and firewire stuff in it - vid capture, etc. It doesn't need an insane size HD - unless you are doing a fair amount of vid capture, then you will want a local AV drive. Most of the data can be dumped to the file server.
For scanning/printing, set up a scan/print (and perhaps even DP) server.
Network all of this using 100BaseT and a hub (or, if you are real cheap like me, use 10BaseT - but spend the money on the cards for 100BaseT, then later get a fast hub). Hook up a KVM switch (I just got a 6 port Aten Master View off Ebay for $50.00 - so it is possible to do this el-cheapo!) to your monitor/mouse/keyboard - so you don't have scads of KVM around - unless you wish to place things so that you can have this (sometimes it is handy to have multiple monitors and such).
Get older motherboards for your ISA connectivity - and distribute everything else...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
About 6 is the absolute maximum number of slots you can get on a PCI bus segment. There are a limited number of "loads" that a PCI bus can support, usually about 10-12 max. The connector counts as a load and the card itself is a load. To go greater than that, you have to have a PCI-PCI bridge. Unfortunately, when you have to go across a bridge, your performance goes down. Because of the way PCI works, transfers on the bus must be interruptible. If the transfer is going across a bridge, you will gain latency when the bridge has to re-negoitate the transfer.
PCI-X has improved this, but right now, PCI-X devices (and motherboards) are pretty rare. You can't mix PCI and PCI-X on the same bus segment without the bus segment downgrading to PCI functionality.
Also, according to the PCI spec, a card can draw up to 25W, which increases the size of your power supply.
The best bet is to go with a motherboard with some integrated functionality- as others have said, compatability is an issue, but there are motherboard makers out there who use high quality parts (which are well supported in Free-OSes), Adaptec for SCSI, Intel for ethernet, and so forth, but you're going to have to pay more for it.