Greetings all. Longtime listener first time poster 
Many years ago [in a quadrant far far away] someone donated a XPS 630i [which is limited to 18 PCIe 2.0 lanes 8,8,1,1] system to me.
I am STILL using it with two Geforce 9800 GT cards (PCIe 2.0 using 8 lanes each)
Now it is time to finally upgrade this beast. I am a FS9 sim gamer--looking to run SIX monitors (currently running 4 with all the hardware [yoke, pedals, etc]
...so I'm looking to add a third 9800GT card to the mix.
My issue is...these cards require 16 PCIe2.0 lanes (or a min of 8 as I'm using them now)....so I'm looking for a mobo that handle 40 lines min
(16,16,8)...as I figure monitors 5 and 6 wont have heavy loads on them like the others with dynamic scenery etc. I'll use them for things like the radio stack, etc.
I dont really want to replace everything and spend thousands, so I figured an older board should work, but I cant find anything that supports
enough lanes. Running these cards at only 50% thruput I assume is a bottleneck..but not sure how much. I know Flight sim is a CPU hog,
so it maybe more of a CPU bottleneck that the GPU's.
anyone...can anyone recommend a good mobo that can handle 3 of these cards AND do decent overclocking??
(or can point me to a site where I can search mobo's by lanes, etc. ) ??
I know about ATX BTX thing with the case, so turning the mobo may require new holes, that's ok...I love the case
Figure finding a small enough cpu cooler
will be the biggest issue (once reason not to go with a 'new' design that will require much more cooling space).
Any thoughts????
Many years ago [in a quadrant far far away] someone donated a XPS 630i [which is limited to 18 PCIe 2.0 lanes 8,8,1,1] system to me.
I am STILL using it with two Geforce 9800 GT cards (PCIe 2.0 using 8 lanes each)
Now it is time to finally upgrade this beast. I am a FS9 sim gamer--looking to run SIX monitors (currently running 4 with all the hardware [yoke, pedals, etc]
...so I'm looking to add a third 9800GT card to the mix.
My issue is...these cards require 16 PCIe2.0 lanes (or a min of 8 as I'm using them now)....so I'm looking for a mobo that handle 40 lines min
(16,16,8)...as I figure monitors 5 and 6 wont have heavy loads on them like the others with dynamic scenery etc. I'll use them for things like the radio stack, etc.
I dont really want to replace everything and spend thousands, so I figured an older board should work, but I cant find anything that supports
enough lanes. Running these cards at only 50% thruput I assume is a bottleneck..but not sure how much. I know Flight sim is a CPU hog,
so it maybe more of a CPU bottleneck that the GPU's.
anyone...can anyone recommend a good mobo that can handle 3 of these cards AND do decent overclocking??
(or can point me to a site where I can search mobo's by lanes, etc. ) ??
I know about ATX BTX thing with the case, so turning the mobo may require new holes, that's ok...I love the case
will be the biggest issue (once reason not to go with a 'new' design that will require much more cooling space).
Any thoughts????