G'day all,

I have done some research into the matter and thought it might be useful to put it online.
First off I want to say that I have capture cards and sound so I was looking to upgrade my MB without having to buy cards again.

New MB's with more than 3 PCI slots are becoming rare.
So that means split the back and front ends, which is were I think I am heading.

Other options are to get as much on board as possible or move stuff off to usb.

So taking each as a module...

Sound
I have not managed to find an MB where I can get 5.1 spdif (either coax or optical) sound to work, mind you I have not tried very hard either.

USB sound for Linux does not seem to be an option either.

PCI-e might be an option I have not looked at this yet.

Video
Not so bad since AGP and PCI(e or x whatever) seems to work OK

So if you can a PCI-e sound card to work and either have an AGP or PCI-x video card you would have 3 PCI slots for your capture cards.
Of course if you go USB for capture you have a few more options.

On a combined FE/BE the most I am going to get is two spare pci slots since I have not found a MB that does 5.1 sound yet, so I need one pci slot for my sound card.

Please fell free to add/subtract to this, I hope it is correct and might be og help to others.

_________________
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stinga

as of 17-May-2018
R8.2 - sort of working.
MB: gigabyte GA-P43-ES3G | RAM: 2GB
VGA: PNY Nvidia GT240 1GB
4 x Technisat skystar 2 dvb | 1 x TBS6981 dvb-s2
pata: 1x300Gb | sata: 2x1Tb 2x2Tb
Problems:
TBS6981 Does not work.

The Asus M2NPV-VM has an optional SPDIF connector. A search of these forums should turn up what was required to get it working (if anything).

I have 2 of these boards for frontends, paired with X2 3800+ and 1Gb RAM. The onboard 6150 chipset performs HDTV playback just fine.

I seem to recall reading that Asus was retiring this particular model, but you can have a look at
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3& ... odelmenu=1