Have they created an external enclosure for pci cards?

[yoda313]

I was wondering if there is an enclosure available for pci cards.

Is that possible? I would be interested if it is. They have enclosures for harddrives and dvd/cd drives these days. How much would it take to create an enclosure for a pci card? I would think it shouldn't be that hard.

Reason I ask is I only have three slots and pci cards are almost always cheaper than dedicated usb devices (or at the very least more feature rich).

So does this exist? If so how can you buy them? Online only? What about connection - usb2.0, firewire, esata?

[Cornucopia]

Google "PCI Expansion Chassis" or exp "systems", or change to PCI-e, PCI-X, etc. You'll come up with alot of choices. How good? I don't know, you have to get reviews from sources you trust...

Scott

[yoda313]

Intersting. Thanks cornucopia. I'll look into it.

[ofbarea]

Hi,

I saw PC using a couple of external PCI cards. The case was a Magma 2 Slot PCI Expansion box. It was a neat but expensive solution. http://www.magma.com/products/pci/index.html

Regards,

[Cornucopia]

With my old company's ProTools rig, I had an Bitwise(I think) 7-slot PCI exp chassis (of which, I was using 6 slots+ the 5 on the MOBO. That was loaded!
I know at the time they also had 13-slot boxes.

Scott

[SCDVD]

I suspect there would be a performance hit with an external PCI expansion chassis. The expansion chassis would be one more interface layer removed from the system buss. Depending what you are adding, this may or may not matter that much.

[Nelson37]

Such things exist, but you would have to have a truly awesome crapload of PCI devices to make one cost-effective over USB or firewire devices. Building a complete second PC would be more reasonable.

[edDV]

Such things exist, but you would have to have a truly awesome crapload of PCI devices to make one cost-effective over USB or firewire devices. Building a complete second PC would be more reasonable.

or replace the mobo

[FulciLives]

If you have 3 PCI slots ... how many more do you need?

Finding a motherboard with more is hard these days but when looking at newegg once I did find one (by accident) that had 4 PCI slots. I can't remember the make/model now ... it was weeks ago.

I doubt you can find a motherboard with more than 4 PCI slots.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[SatStorm]

3 PCI slots are not enough for me too! I need four:

1 PCI for a SCSI controller (to use with an ancient nokia 9600 DVB S receiver
1 PCI slot for a Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250
1 PCI slot for a SkyStar 2 DVB S card
1 PCI slot for a AirStar DVB T card

That for my grabbing video machine that also includes a firewire in the motherboard, for my Canupus AVC100!

[yoda313]

Wow a 1000.00 for that magma one??? Yikes. Maybe usb is the better alternative.

Though it would be hilarious to run a pci-e graphics card on an external interface. I always thought it should have been possible to run a graphics card outside of the case. Now with esata and other superfast interfaces perhaps it will become more feasible.

EDIT _ just checked ebay. THey have some for 350 to 400.00 on ebay. One is even a magma brand.

While this not very practical it is interesting. I was curiuos if it was even possible. But yeah either finding an equivalent usb/firewire version or building another computer is probably more practical. THough if you add an os expense than this might be a little cheaper. Though I'm sure adding shipping would eat into savings given the weight of these things.

[edDV]

The graphics card needs the fastest bus connection since it deals mostly with uncompressed video + needs fast texture loads for 3D games. Keep in mind that a disk RAID is needed to handle fully uncompressed SD video. Scale that up to 1280x1024 or 1680x1050 and you can see the need for wide data bandwidth.

Now if the monitor could decode MPeg internally, then the data connection could be less demanding. There is such a monitor, it is called an HDTV. You could feed it a ATSC/QAM/DVB modulated RF coax connection or using the new Samsung 750 series as an example, you could feed MPeg2_TS or Divx/Xvid directly over USB2 at HD resolutions.

Another way to approach the problem is with the proposed SATA/3Gbps standard that could carry uncompressed monitor video. It isn't clear if this would work with cable lengths longer than HDMI's 20 or so feet.

[yoda313]

@eddv - really? That's interesting a monitor that decodes video internally intstead of just displaying it? Amazing what's going on with video these days...

[ofbarea]

3 PCI slots are not enough for me too! I need four:

1 PCI for a SCSI controller (to use with an ancient nokia 9600 DVB S receiver
1 PCI slot for a Hauppauge WinTV PVR 250
1 PCI slot for a SkyStar 2 DVB S card
1 PCI slot for a AirStar DVB T card

That for my grabbing video machine that also includes a firewire in the motherboard, for my Canupus AVC100!

The Via based AsRock 4CoreDual-SATA2 R2.0 supports 4 PCI slots, 1 4x PCIe and 1 AGP slot.

Before moving to my current mobo/cpu I was using the their previous model, the 775Dual-VSTA with 2 GB DDR RAM, Vista x64 and 8800 ultra based PCIe video card. I had the 4 PCI slots with cards in use (sound blaster audigy, Gigbit Nic, Firewire 800, eSata card).

Before using the 8800 Ultra I was using a XP, an AIW 8500DV and a PCIe Firewire 800 card.