Building a computer for 4 PCIx8 data acqusition cards

[abhinavksn]

Hello,

I need to build a computer for acquiring data through 4 PCIx8 data acquisition cards. Can anyone suggest a PC config which can take data from all the four cards at their max speed of 2GB/s.

Thanks in advance

 

[itzdanielp]

Will you be doing any heavy gaming that would need a dedicated GPU?


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188099
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188098

along with one of these
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115073
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115070

and
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125400

Which will give you a solid workstation with good graphics (although not for intense gaming) And since they both can run 5 PCIe x8 slots at the same time it will work for the 4 data cards and 1 gpu

 

[jbschmerge]

hmmm... you need to flesh in some details here. What is happening to the data being captured... Is it being processed in real-time, written to disk, being cached in memory, etc?

Its also not clear as to whether each card is generating 2GB/s worth of data or if this would be the sum of what all of them are capturing.

Without those details, I can't really recommend anything. What I will say is that you're most likely looking to build a machine around a high-end board with 6+ pcie x8/x16 slots.

In addition to the data capture cards, you're going to most likely need to be able to write all of that data to disk. Most on-motherboard SATA storage solutions can't achieve the type of data rates that you're looking for, so you're also probably looking at needing one or two high-end SAS/SATA raid controllers (needing an x8 pcie slot).

I know of only two motherboards that have this type of expandibility. Asus P6T7 & Asus P6X58-E

 

[abhinavksn]

Actually its completely for data acquisition but I think these motherboards are good enough. I have a small doubt since I am not that good with hardware. If all the 4 cards work at 2Gbps that's 8Gbps of data that I will be working on. Can the data be logged on the hard disk at that speed. I have seen that the speed of SATA link is only 6Gbps. Is there any solution for this.

Also I found that my data acquisition cards are so thick that they take up 2 slot space. So the above motherboards can take only three cards. The motherboards you have suggested are good enough at present. But it would be good if I can use all the four cards.

Thank you for the response.

 

[abhinavksn]

I am answering to your questions below

Q) hmmm... you need to flesh in some details here. What is happening to the data being captured... Is it being processed in real-time, written to disk, being cached in memory, etc?
A) The data will be written directly to the disk

Q) Its also not clear as to whether each card is generating 2GB/s worth of data or if this would be the sum of what all of them are capturing.
A) Each card is generating 2Gb/s of data, that's 8Gb/s of data to be written to hard disk

Also the cards are so thick that they occupy 2 slot space so I think Asus P6t7 is good for me. But can you give some advice about the Data transfer to the hard disk. I am asking this because all the 7 slots of the ASUS P6T7 will be blocked(4 of them used by the cards and 3 will be obstructed by the cards).

Thank you for the response.