need PC-upgrade / mother board advice!

[Gary_101]

hi Folks,

I'm running my old Pulsar I and II cards in parallel on an older Dell Optiplex 760 system, which has been ok in Win7. I'd like to upgrade to the latest Scope software, but need a somewhat newer and faster computer. The problem is, finding one with 2 available PCI slots for the 2 pulsar cards.

Can I get any recommendations on motherboards / workstations / towers that might work for my needs? I'm using a dual monitor system right now with Analog / DVI options, so having that extra video output really helps too. Estimating, according to Sonic-Core's advice that 16 G RAM + 500G SSD would be nice, along with Windows 10.

Thanks for any suggestions. It's the PCI slot issue that's hard to find a good match for on eBay or Facebook marketplace etc.

Gary

[st1]

Hey there,

If you do want a motherboard with support for modern CPUs and native >1 PCI slots, you seem to be best off with industrial motherboards. (See multiple threads in the "Tech Talk" section.)

Alternative is to use PCIe->PCI adapters, see recent thread for this.

Final option is to use a dual machine approach, with an older HP/DELL or similar workstation as the SCOPE PCI host, and then all your modern, fancy plug-ins and software on a non-PCI machine interfacing via ADAT to the SCOPE machine (using something like an RME interface in the 'modern' machine).
This, though, requires a multi-KVM approach, which is not ideal, but it probably gives you the best stability vs modern software flexibility. But not as integrated as above, and probaly also with a higher total power consumption.
(There are threads about this on Tech Talk too).

[valis]

There are plenty of options available in workstation class. vendors like Supermicro, MSI, AData and others have boards with PCI slots. You will need to settle for CPU's a few generations back, but on newegg sorting the motherboard list by PCI slots to see boards with 3, 4 & 5 PCI slots shows 3 pages of results.

[fidox]

I have 7/6th generation motherboard :
3xPCI (Gigabyte - GA-Z170-D3H)
Intel i7 7700k
32gb ram (Corsair VENGEANCE LPX DDR4 RAM 32GB 3200MHz CL16 Intel XMP 2.0)
nVidia GT710 Silent
Windows 10 64bit Pro
Steinberg Cubase 14 pro
Scope 7.0

[Gary_101]

THANKS GUYS. I did finally get a guy on Facebook marketplace to build one for me for under $300, including Win10 Pro:
Motherboard: AsRock H97 Pro4
16GB ram
1TB SSD
2TB SATA

looks like it's got the right socket set, so I'm trying out 5.1 before I upgrade to Scope V7.

[valis]

5.1 driver under Win10 will be an issue, and having to run Scope as Administrator can be a tad frustrating. Recommend Scope 7