Oldschool dev PC setup

well first off- almost every 64-bit pci card also works as a 32-bit in a normal pci slot... what cards are you trying to run that need a full length pci-x slot?

very few other than server boards have full-length pci-x, but the interchangability with pci is one of the good points of pci-x

pci-express, pci, isa supporting boards do exist, but for these, you're going to be looking at CURRENT pricing, not old stock prices as is the case with p4 and older boards.

 

Most PCIX cards that are not 33MHz/64bit will not work in regular PCI (33/32) slots. They are notched differently. I have a number of nice SCSI controllers, NICs, and access to a really nice DSP. I had 33/64 and 66/64 slots on my previous motherboards (tyan dual Athlon MP boards) so I picked up a few high powered things to take advantage.

PCIX cards that are compatible with regular PCI are typically the extremely low powered/priced cards, early gigabit cards, scsi w/o a dedicated processor slotted ram or battery backup, and maybe some funky other cards. Then of course there's the odd 66MHz/32bit card that are designed to take advantage of the situation if they're tossed into a higher slot. This is one of the reason so few people use PCIX other than with what comes in slots in server machines, it can sometimes be difficult to determine compatabilities, some slots for example are *only* 100/133MHz and will not take 33/66MHz cards.

Anyways, if I were to build a dedicated dev machine, I'd also use it for data recovery and such, so I'd want to be able to take advantage of some of my nicer cards.

I have one dual P3 server board (WTX I think) that has 1xAGP, 4x PCI (33/32), 1x PCI (??/64), and 1x ISA. Don't have the processors to test it, nor the riser for the ram, but I know that such boards exist, even if they might only be server boards.

 

yeah- i think your best bet for finding pci-x is going to be the server market- apple did support them for a little while, but also, mainly for their high-end and servers-

it sounds realistic for a p3 server board to support all that- isa was still.. somewhat around in that timeframe.

as you say, the notching is indeed a problem and designed to indicate non-32 bit capable boards or voltage restricted...

 

I got an ASUS P3B-F board for free from a person in local Linux User Group back in 2003.

In 2009 a coworker decommissioned his toy collocation server and I got 4x512 PC133 SDRAM and 2xTualatin Pentium 3 1.4 GHz CPUs, again for free

I also bought two active Slot-1 to Socket-370 converters (Upgradeware something, don't really remember).

So anyway, this PC with P3 1.4GHz and 2GB RAM runs Windows XP SP3 like a charm and has two ISA slots for my Gravis Ultrasound PnP and PC Comms Link card for Caetla/PSX stuff

And for Video I have 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 AGP

You can probably build a similar setup for under 100$ and it'll work as well as those overpriced industrial P4 boards.

PS: gosh darn, I just realized I'm a necromancer and I've risen a long dead topic