Dual PCIe Video Cards and HTPC

[dave127]

basically, this summer i'm going to be saving up to do some work on my pc, to convert it to an all in one entertainment solution for my room at school, i was hoping to have 4 monitors running off of this machine (single 2005fpw surrounded by two 1704fp's- one per side, and an HDTV). Right now im running a P4 2.4 on an Asus P4P800 with 512 megs of awesome ddr...so what im looking to do between now and the end of summer is grab up a couple of pcie video cards and a pci hdtv tuner and do a complete system overhaul....where should i start looking to become informed on such things? right now my goal is to be able to have a large amount of storage space (rip all my dvd's to disk) and play video straight from the computer to the hdtv or the monitors, depending on what im doing....i also have my xbox hooked up thru vga right now to my 2005....anyone offer any suggestions for potential setups and an estimate of cost?

thanks,
Dave

 

[ribbon13]

I don't keep up on intel, but I'm unaware of any P4 boards with dual pcie

 

[stevty2889]

It looks like there are some 925xe and 915p chipset boards coming out with dual PCIe 16x slots. There will be motherboards with the Nvidia Nforce 4 with SLI coming for P4's eventualy that will support dual PCIe video cards, not sure if they will be available by the end of summer, but they may be. Not sure if the Nvidia chipset will support EM64T enabled CPU's or Dual Cores(which could be out by the end of summer), but the 945 and 955 chipset boards that support dual core should be coming out before the dual core cpu's hit the shelves.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: dave127
single 2005fpw surrounded by two 1704fp's- one per side, and an HDTV

That's downright boner-inducing.

Your predicament is that as others have posted, there's no Intel + Dual PCIe x16 solution yet. And when one does become available, it will likely be LGA775 based, necessitating an upgrade to that socket. Possibly even DDR2, negating your RAM to boot.

If you Gotta Have it Now, your only option is an A64. Not that an A64 is a bad thing.

- M4H