Hiya

I found a board that supports dual Xeon processors and has 7 16x pci slots and it got me wondering, if one decided to install dual slot GPU cards, you would only be able to fit four cards in there, leaving 3 slots free. You would have 16 lanes left you could eat up so could a person put on a ribbon extender on a pci slot that would otherwise be covered by a gpu and use it? I mean, I know the board chipset would have to support it but would it actually work?

I assume you actually meant PciE slots or they wouldn't have the 16x designation. That 16x leads me to believe the board provides supports that level of bandwidth 7 x 15x slots slots. Assuming there is no disclaimer of actual usage, I see no reason for it not to work aside from timing issues affecting accuracy and efficiency.

Using PCIe risers *should* work......but I'd reconsider.

You cant be planning on using this for gaming (max AMD/ATI crossfire and nVidia SLI is 4 cards, and with current nVidia GPUs that is limited to 2 cards in SLI).

Bitcoin mining? These days you're wasting time and electrical power to mine on GPUs, spend your money on a specialised ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) miner.

GPGPU would be the least strange reason to have dual xeon 7 PCIe system. But gah, no. Even if the PCIe bandwidth doesnt matter (you arent going to get 7 PCIe x16 slots unless you spend a insane amount of money) the amount you have to spend on just the dual xeon board means you'd be better off with a 2 x single xeon systems with 3 or 4 video cards. Thats aside from the engineering you'd need to do to get 7x dual slot video cards to even fit into a case. Unless I've missed some huge case made to do that.....which would be way more than 2 standard cases anyway.

I don't really keep up all that closely with generic PC hardware, but 7 fully-wired 16x slots sounds like a lot to me. Are you sure all the slots are actually physically wired for all 16 lanes? Sometimes things can be misleading, you've got to read the fine print.

You can go way past 7 x 16x PCIe.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/m...RG-OTF-CPU.cfm

Its also US $3 K+ for the 2 boards, case and PSU, without CPUs, RAM or HDDs.

http://www.wiredzone.com/supermicro-...r-trt-10023188

That's only one more 16x slot and it costs $3,000 for a bare board and case. No CPUs, memory, or hard disks? So you'd probably end up spending $10,000 or pretty close to it by the time everything is said and done. Ouch.

EDIT:
The latest Xeon chips that fit this are around $2100, so add $4200 for your CPUs..