Hi.

It's getting to the point where I need to update my CAD machine. The current one has served well for about 3 years now, but for various reasons is getting to be a bit too slow. So, I need to find a new motherboard. Not really a problem, except for one issue.

I currently run 6 monitors on the thing, under XP. This is achieved with a motherboard that allows one PCI-E card, one AGP card, and one PCI card to co-exist. I need to find a decent motherboard that will allow at least three PCI-E cards to be fitted at the same time, with at least two PCI slots as well. One for an 8 port serial card (you can never have too many RS-232 ports when doing hardware development), one for future upgrade. It also needs copious amounts of USB sockets, and ideally will be a socket 775 board for a core2duo or core2quad processor.

I've had a look at various manufacturers web sites, such as Asus and Gigabyte, but none of them seem to allow you to search on features like number of x16 PCI-E slots. And there are so many variations it'll take days to go through them all the hard way. I'm hoping someone here may have already come across something that meets these specs and can point me in the right direction.

pca