[mythtv-users] AM2 Motherboard with PCI slots galore

[Brian Wood]

Ronald Frazier wrote:
>>  Since I have 4 capture cards, a serial port card, and an IDE controller
>>  card, I need to have those 6 slots.
> 
> Sorry, I can't find you anything like that. The best I can do is 5 slots:
> http://www.motherboards.org/mobot/motherboards_d/ASRock/AM2NF3-VSTA/
> http://www.motherboards.org/mobot/motherboards_d/Jetway/M2GT6-PTD/
> 
> Perhaps you can lose the serial port card. I have seen serveral USB
> serial port emulators. For example:
> http://sewelldirect.com/usbtoserial.asp
> 
> I've never looked into the details, so I don't know how transparent it
> is, whether it works under linux, etc, but it's worth looking into.
> They are relatively inexpensive (I believe I've seen them for $6 or
> so...probably on ebay). And going forward, it's probably only going to
> get harder to find motherboards with lots of slots, so you might have
> to migrate away from the PCI cards anyway.
> 
> Actually...I should have asked this first, but how many serial ports
> do you need? If just one, you are aware that most motherboards still
> have a single serial port header, right?
> 

Remember that if you are using a serial port for an LIRC-type IR blaster 
you can't use a USB-to-Serial adapter, even if the adapter "works" under 
Linux.

This is because the blaster uses the serial port in a non-standard way. 
It uses one or more handshaking lines to drive the blaster LED, and 
doesn't even use the tx/rx lines.

beww