PCI obsolescence

[vt92]

Hello,

Have any of you ran into issue with PCI slot obsolescence?

Here is my story:  My company (a very large international firm) has a centralized IT department that selects standardized PCs for the worldwide locations.  The PCs are leased and swapped out every 2 -3 years.  Until recently, they had a tower option that came with several PCI slots.  That option no longer exists.  So, now I have a test system that needs three PCI slots, but the new PC only has one slot.

Here are my options (that I have thought of)

• Purchase the current PC and continue to use it for my test system.  This is the best short term solution, but evetually this PC will break, be obsolete, etc.
• Replace the PCI cards with PCI-X,etc.  $$$$
• Purchase a new "non-standard" PC, but central IT will not allow me to connect it to the corporate network. :manmad:
• Use the new PC with PCI-x to PCI adapters.  Anyone have experience here? 

  http://www.beaglesoft.com/pcie2pci.htm

  Any other ideas?

[crossrulz]

I have not noticed this being a problem.  But it has been a couple of years since I did some PC shopping.  Are the slots on the new computer PCI-X or PCIe?  I would expect to see more PCIe slots.  NI tends to make both PCI and PCIe flavors of most of their cards.  So you might be able to buy replacement hardware, just using a different bus.

At my former company, we bought our own computers for test sets.  But we also declared that the test sets should never be on the network.  Once IT got their hands on a computer, it would never quite work the way we needed it.

[gaving]

<rant> Please be careful with your wording...PCI-X is NOT PCI Express (PCIe). </rant>

One has to admit that PCI slots are becoming less and less popular with modern PCs shipped from big computer companies. You will eventually have to spend the $$ in the future to upgrade to PCIe. However, I wanted to give a plug to Magma: 

http://www.magma.com/catalog/classic-pci-expansion

They have many options for number of PCI slots, and (at the time of my posting) have several host cards you can choose from (including x1 PCIe, ExpressCard/34, ExpressCard/54, PCMCIA and PCI). These will cost you $$ too, so you will just have to weigh the pros/cons of keeping PCI cards or upgrading now to PCIe.

Good luck!

-gavin