Not enough room :(

[Illathen]

well its kind of a stupid problem really and maybe in the wrong section of this thread but here goes.

The mobo i have has these slots in this order.

Master PCIe X16
PCIe
PCIe
Slave PCI X16
PCI
PCI

now the crap i have to put in them is
2 x Radeon 1GB 2900XTs
Razer sound Card
Asus Physix accelerator
(an i need a way of connecting this computer with another one)

anyway the problem is these GPUs take up two brackets so they partialy cover the ports lower of them making it impossible to fit my other cards unless i remove the Fan/heatsink and go fo a watercooling block however this is expensive and the only other option i could find (External PCI box) is £600 upwards for just 2 slots which is rediculous.

firstly if anybody could help me with a solution to the space problem it would be great
and secondly this is the first time i have tried to set up two pc's on lan an run them off the same net connection so what will i need? They are both XP.
will i need a seperate ethernet card or do some mobos have imbedded lan support?

any help would be extreamly appreciated.

 

[almcneil]

The answer to your first question is perhaps using a card/bus extender. It's like a small PCI card with bus lines that allow you to extend the location of a device card farther out so it doesn't interfere with adjacent cards. Just a thought, may not solve your problem without actually looking at your system.

In the second, all you need is a router. Windows XP has the networking software and setup you need.

 

[Tedster]

if one of your regular PCI slots is being used by a sound card then you may have to sacrifice it for onboard sound.

Other than that- I suggest going to one large dual GPU PCI-E card.

Personally, I don't really see the advantage here.

But you might also want to consider changing motherboards.

 

[Illathen]

well i t seems i either have to choose between excelent quality sound which i am a huge fan of when gaming or amazing physix .
if watercooling blocks do eventualy get released for the 2900XT then i can free up the other slot and have both,

as for the bus extender i had a look at these but i dont feel that it would help as the Gpu is blocking anything large from being incerted into the spare PCI slot. (the card takes up two brackets and the case gets in the way of the spare slot http://tweakers.net/ext/i/1177491193.jpg) maybe if you could get a PCI extender cable and hook it into the blocked slot then place the sound card in any old spare bracket but i could find anything similar to this through a quick google search.

And this is actualy a brandnew P35 mobo i dont really feel like changing it but i did have a look at others and the positioning of the pci slots seems to be pretty similar across all motherboard, i guess its a hard fact that if you want a modern graphics card you will have to sacrifice a great deal more room

 

[MetalX]

You want to add a network card in to the computer right? Well almost every motherboard out there has one or more integrated LAN ports. You can just use those. There's no performance advantage to having a separate card. Also, there are almost no games that actually use those physics cards. Almost all games just use the CPU, and in future they will use some of the stream processors in 8000 and HD2000 series cards. Take out the Physics card, you won't need it.