64-bit hot plug PCI slots??

[Vas_Deferens]

Hi, a friend of mine inherited a Gateway 6400 Server PC. He wants to use it as a regular home pc, so I thought I'd help him try and run it. One confusing part is that it has 2- 64bit 33mhz, 5v hot- plug, PCI slots, and 5- 5v hot plug PCI slots. I want to get him a modem to put into one the regular PCI slots, but I read somewhere that it can't use a 3.3v card. Is there a difference with these PCI slots? What does hot-plug mean? and what would you use with those longer 64 bit pci slots? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

Vas

 

[Peter]

You'll hardly find any actual 3.3V-only cards. They should all be "universal". Fear not, the cards and slots have a mechanical coding to prevent plugging electrically incompatible stuff together.

Hot Plug means that the board can power down each slot separately, to allow replacing dead cards while the system is running. The operating system must be ready for this of course.

The 64-bit slots are for the more serious stuff like fast SCSI and RAID controllers, GBit ethernet, these things.

regards, Peter

 

[Vas_Deferens]

Pete, thanks so much for the info.

Vas