Need Motherboard advice for setting desktop as RT target

[dan_u]

Hi Nelson
I guess you have to ask some PC supplier (probably industrial PC supplier as they are more likely to have "older" hardware available). From just a quick look I could find boards with 5 PCI slots but with an unsupported onboard ethernet adapter.
Most newer boards obviously have PCI-E slots instead of PCI. So you might be lucky with one of these "old" socket 478 boards. Intel P4 processors are available for these boards.
By the way, if you find a 6 PCI slot board you don't necessarily have to buy the PCI-8232 card (unless you need a GPIB port as well). You can also buy a PCI ethernet adapter with a supported chipset.

Regards,
Daniel

[NelsonO]

Hello.  Thank you for all of your help and advice.  I was able to find an industrial PC  vendor (ADEK industrial PC) that is able to provide a pc with almost limitless PCI slots, Pentium 4 chipset, serial ATA channels, and LabVIEW comaptible BIOS.  I succesfully installed the LabVIEW RT OS on the hard drive and have been busy programming my applications.  Testing and debugging so far is proving this out to be a good system.

The only difficulty I ran into was formatting the hard drive as a FAT32.  The problem here was that I had an 80 GB hard drive and most Windows 98 and Windows XP install software I had wants to automatically format a hard drive that is larger than 32 GB as NTFS.  I was able to download partitioning and formatting software from the hard drive manufacturer.  Word of warning here is to make sure you can trust the source of the software you use to partition/format the hard drive.