Hi everyone

As some of you may know, I am a member of the MediaPortal development team. I currently only have one PC that I use for development, HTPC, office stuff, a little gaming... the works. It seems that computer (which is now 4 or 5 years old) is on its way out. I think it is the mobo chipset that is dying. Anyhow, what I'd like to do is buy a new PC and salvage as many of the parts as I can from the old one to allow me to assemble a cheap test box. The test box would be more specifically for MediaPortal development, but I might try and dual-boot with Ubuntu etc. etc. etc. Got lots of ideas (;)). The key thing from a MediaPortal development perspective is that I want to try and house as many of the TV tuners that I can inside this box and treat it as a standalone TV Server. That allows me to test the hardware as well as a client-server setup.

Okay, getting to the point now - the test box.

I think I'll be able to recover the CPU (Intel Core 2 e6600 - LGA775 2.4 GHz) and some/all of the RAM (DDR2) from my current PC. That should save me a little bit of money. HDDs are relatively cheap, and the case and PS don't matter to me to much at this point. The motherboard is the critical thing. I want a mobo that can take the Core 2 CPU and RAM, and it *must* house the four older PCI TV tuners that I have for compatibility testing.

I've done some searching and it seems that LGA775 + DDR2 + 4xPCI combinations are not very common. I guess that is because PCI was starting to "die" around the time that Core 2 was released. I did manage to find a few models:

GA-P35-S3G
GA-P45T-ES3G
GA-P43T-ES3G
GA-P43-ES3G
GA-EP43-DS3R
Asus Commando
MSI P45 Neo3-FR

I'm sure that is not an exhaustive list, but it was all that I could find in a couple of hours of searching Google and mobo manufacturer websites. Unfortunately none of them seem to be available any more...

Have you got a mobo that you want to get rid of that would suit my needs?

mm