Ian C Posted August 5, 2010 Share Posted August 5, 2010 I know there are a few PC components bods on here, so here goes. I've got a shiny new bit of kit for my PC, but it's a PCIe x4 slot and my current mobo doesn't have any of those. It only has old skool PCI, a PCIe x1, and a single PCIe x16 which has a fat graphics card stuffed into it, natch. Two questions. One, can someone reassure me that the small connector of a PCIe x4 card will go into the big slot of a PCIe x16 and will actually work, even though these things are usually used just for another gfx card? Two, I have very specific requirements and I'm going nuts trying to find a mobo for sale that fits them. I need to support: Core 2 Quad 6600 DDR2 800mhz RAM Intel ICH10R RAID hosting 6* SATA 300 devices An additional controller hosting 1* IDE and 1* SATA device And of course as many PCIe x16 and/or x4 slots as possible. I narrowed it down to my three fave mobo makers: MSI P45 Platinum MSI P45 Neo2 Asus P5Q Premium (this would be ideal as it's got scads of network and USB too) Asus P5Q Deluxe Gigabyte GA-EP45-DQ6 Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3P The Asus P5Q Premium is £145 off ebay, owch owch owch and that's compounded with the fact I don't trust ebay people at all. The P5Q Deluxe I can get from dabs.com for £125 which is still bending over somewhat but with my crazy requirements I know I'm not getting one on the cheap. The Gigabytes and MSI ones seem to be wholly unavailable anywhere barring one ropey remanufactured P45 Platinum off ebay for £100 So does anyone know where I can get those or an equivalent one from for less cash I'll snap up any working 2nd hand ones available on here -Ian Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wez Posted August 5, 2010 Share Posted August 5, 2010 It's the Intel raid that's pushing the price up, the other requirements can be found on much cheaper boards. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DamanC Posted August 5, 2010 Share Posted August 5, 2010 PCIe devices will work in any PCIe slot regardless of lane speed, it will simply down speed. What piece of kit is it? We use ASUS P5P43TD PRO in our C2D/Q Range. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Porky1978 Posted August 5, 2010 Share Posted August 5, 2010 http://www.overclockers.co.uk Always been very good on price when i needed stuff. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
neo2810 Posted August 5, 2010 Share Posted August 5, 2010 Ebuyer.com.... Very seldom beaten on price. Novatech.co.uk dabs.com And the P5Q Deluxe has never given me any issues Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wez Posted August 5, 2010 Share Posted August 5, 2010 PCIe devices will work in any PCIe slot regardless of lane speed, it will simply down speed. What piece of kit is it? We use ASUS P5P43TD PRO in our C2D/Q Range. The same with old PCI too, previously I have had to use larger 64bit Intel based network cards in 32bit slots. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
caseys Posted August 5, 2010 Share Posted August 5, 2010 PCIe devices will just set themselves to the lowest common denominator, so if you have a 1x card it'll run 1x. Also you're looking to buy on the cusp of product transition to DDR3. Do you really want to buy a core 2 Quad when ideally for better longevity for £ right now you should look at i5/i7 + DDR3 type of combos? Just IMHO. Raid good, PCI requirements good, DDR2 architecture is phasing out. That and what the heck have you got that's IDE? Or is the 6600 existing and not part of your upgrade? If so ignore allllll of the above Then again I can't say much as I'm running 2 x 3Ghz E5472's with DDR2. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scott Posted August 5, 2010 Share Posted August 5, 2010 www.overclockers.co.uk Always been very good on price when i needed stuff. I'm surprised you are recommending them. I find them quite expensive compared to other online stores. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wez Posted August 5, 2010 Share Posted August 5, 2010 I'm surprised you are recommending them. I find them quite expensive compared to other online stores. Although good service and the forum can be very helpful. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian C Posted August 5, 2010 Author Share Posted August 5, 2010 It's the Intel raid that's pushing the price up, the other requirements can be found on much cheaper boards. Yep I'll just have to bite the pillow haha. Can't be without RAID, I mirror all my disks as most of the stuff on them is irreplaceable film stuff. Which also means it has to be the Intel RAID so they are portable, but that doesn't seem to be an issue, it's the de facto primary RAID solution across all manufacturers it seems. PCIe devices will work in any PCIe slot regardless of lane speed, it will simply down speed. What piece of kit is it? It needs a 4x slot, certainly won't fit into a 1x one It's an OCZ RevoDrive, a glorious bit of storage. I want to record uncompressed AVI via FRAPs at 1920*1200, 50fps+. My existing hard drives just about cope, but this will massively improve matters, and also make editing them a lot faster when used as a scratch media drive. http://www.overclockers.co.uk Always been very good on price when i needed stuff. Alas I won't touch them with a bargepole. Their customer service is, and always has been, laughably bad. Ebuyer.com.... Very seldom beaten on price. Novatech.co.uk dabs.com And the P5Q Deluxe has never given me any issues Thanks for that, I already love Dabs longtime, but I'll try the other two out, see what they have in stock. Scan.co.uk have the Deluxe in for £91 but it's awaiting stock with no eta, Dabs have it in stock but for £125 I'd rather have the Premium but can't find it anywhere. Or is the 6600 existing and not part of your upgrade? If so ignore allllll of the above I already have an existing PC running an MSI P45 Neo3 board and 4gb of DDR2, and a Core 2 quad etc., and I'm very happy with the performance and I'm not going to spend x hundred pounds to junk it all and go i7 and DDR3 That OCZ drive was already kinda expensive, and I recently got a GTX 285 to speed up the motion capture software so no more upgrades for a while after this! Oh and I use an IDE slot for two DVD burners Thanks again for the help guys. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wez Posted August 5, 2010 Share Posted August 5, 2010 SATA burners are cheap enough these days so I wouldnt let the requirement for IDE limit your choice Surprised about your overclockers experience, I always found them to be pretty good but a little on the pricey side, I use ebuyer for 80% of my purchases. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian C Posted August 5, 2010 Author Share Posted August 5, 2010 I found Dabs.com had the P5Q Deluxe for £96 all in, including next day delivery Cheaper than any of the other sites (by quite a margin in some, overcockers wanted £135 ) and one left in stock. It's now in the proverbial post I found my spare machine has a free PCIe 16x slot so I bunged it in that and it worked fine. The speed of this SSD setup is frightening Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wez Posted August 5, 2010 Share Posted August 5, 2010 The speed of this SSD setup is frightening Good aren't they, what made you go for PCIe based card over a more traditional SATA based SSD? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian C Posted August 5, 2010 Author Share Posted August 5, 2010 Good aren't they, what made you go for PCIe based card over a more traditional SATA based SSD? I already have a SATA 120gb SSD, it's a 2nd gen OCZ one, I think they are on gen 4 or 5 now. My OS runs on it which is great, slicker'n snot But I'm now suffering from TRIM problems when trying to record video to it. It causes hitching every 3 seconds or so due to it mucking out write blocks, which isn't much use when trying to record As Im on WinXP I can't fix it without blatting the entire drive, and that's the OS gone as well, sigh. And before people jump up and down in their seats to advocate going to Win7, most of the stuff I use to make my film needs WinXP to work. So then someone shows me this monster PCIe one and it runs an internal striped RAID to make use of two channels of SATA in parallel. It'll peg both of them at 580mb/s in tests and write speed is just under 500mb/s, compared to my current SSD of about 120mb/s. I had no free SATA slots with six mirrored pair HDDs and the SSD already (and two burners on the one IDE slot ) so this seems ideal, shame I didn't check I had a mobo slot free that fitted it as well I'll use it as a scratch media drive for editing and recording, and also dump my Steam install on it. If it gets TRIM problems I'll move Steam off temporarily and flatten it with the cleanup utility. When I said the RevoDrive speed was frightening, I meant compared to the current SSD HDDs just don't get a lookin haha scan.co.uk are selling 120gb ones for £290. Barg, if you need crazy fast media speeds for video editing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wez Posted August 5, 2010 Share Posted August 5, 2010 I can assure you that SSD TRIM issues are not 100% resolved in Win7 either, it depends on the drive and what firmware you run, my OS install is sat on a Corsair X64 which with my current firmware revision would also require me to dump the OS and zero the drive to get the same performance it had on first install. The issue is I cant be bothered Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
caseys Posted August 5, 2010 Share Posted August 5, 2010 The speed of this SSD setup is frightening If you think a single one is fast... I played with an array : 64gb cache 32 x 73gb SSD in 7+parity raid 5 sets 24 x 4gbps Connections A > 100 core host Let's say the hardware wasn't the bottleneck... You start to get lots of application bottlenecks Alas I don't get to keep Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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