PCI card slots are still available
Martin Rowe, Senior Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 4/1/2009 2:00:00 AM
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Recently, I visited an online forum where one engineer asked for options for duplicating an existing PC-based test system that has four PCI expansion slots. His problem: Consumer-grade desktop PCs still have expansion slots, but not that many.
If you look at new Dell or HP desktop PCs, you’re unlikely to find any with more than two expansion slots. Fred Blönnigen, CEO of Bustec, explained how the problem has affected business decisions: “We bought a Dell computer recently that didn’t provide any PCI expansion slots. That’s why we prefer to offer instruments that use industry-standard buses such as Ethernet and VXI over PCI, PCI Express, or USB.”
The PCI bus, though, is far from dead in all but high-volume consumer PCs. You can find plenty of PCI slots if you look to industrial PCs. For example, an engineer in the online forum suggested industrial PC maker Kontron, which offers a PC motherboard with four PCI slots (photo).
 Unlike many consumer PCs, this motherboard from industrial PC maker Kontron has four PCI slots. Courtesy of Kontron. |
But you don’t have to go to industrial PCs to get PCI slots. Ted Briggs, chief technologist at GaGe Applied Technologies, said, “Intel, ASUS, Tyan, and other motherboard manufacturers provide full-featured motherboards with as many as six expansion slots. Most current PCI cards will operate in a PCI-X slot at 33-MHz speeds with 32-bit data buses.” I couldn’t, though, find an ASUS or Tyan motherboard with more than three PCI/PCI-X slots (plus two PCIe slots).
Briggs noted that you may run into a barrier when you need a PC for test or data acquisition: your company’s IT department. In many companies, the IT department purchases computers, and you may have to get special approval to buy a “nonstandard” PC for the lab or production floor.
“PCI desktop PCs are throwaways now,” said Bob Judd, marketing manager at United Electronic Industries. “A typical data-acquisition card can cost more than the computer housing it.” High-end instrument cards can cost several thousand dollars, far exceeding the cost of a desktop PC.
Instrument makers not only still produce PCI cards, they’re still developing new cards. In the last few months, we’ve received several press releases for PCI instrument cards such as digitizers, bus communicators, and frame grabbers. Not only are engineers still building PCI-based instrument systems, but as Briggs pointed out, “PCI interfaces are well documented and relatively easy to design.”
Richard McDonell, product marketing manager at National Instruments, noted that “Plug-in modules are still preferred for rack-mount automated test-and-measurement applications. PCI-to-GPIB and PCIe-to-GPIB instrument cards remain the leading preference for instrument control.” McDonell also noted that engineers prefer the PCI bus over USB or Ethernet because of PCI’s low latency.
You can expect PCs with enough PCI slots to be available for years to come, even if not from consumer PC or motherboard makers. As testimony to this, both Judd and Briggs note that their companies still sell ISA instrument cards even though consumer PCs lost these slots years ago.
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