Motherboard advice wanted

[Varsel]

Anyone know of board for any Phenom II X6 processor that has all the following:
1. At least five PCIe/PCI slots (hopefully 2 supporting nVIDIA SLI).
2. Floppy disc drive.
3. At least five SATA connectors.
4. Gigabit ethernet.
5. At least one FireWire, and three USB 2.0 ports.
Been looking for a while now, and not finding any that has all my requirements...mostly its the floppy thats MIA! Anyone know something I don't?

[batharoy]

Anyone know of board for any Phenom II X6 processor that has all the following:
1. At least five PCIe/PCI slots (hopefully 2 supporting nVIDIA SLI).
2. Floppy disc drive.
3. At least five SATA connectors.
4. Gigabit ethernet.
5. At least one FireWire, and three USB 2.0 ports.
Been looking for a while now, and not finding any that has all my requirements...mostly its the floppy thats MIA! Anyone know something I don't?

Thats going to be your problem. No motherboards that I know of support floppy's along with SATA and SLI.

Your best bet is to get an external USB Floppy drive if you really need it.

Your also going to have a hard time finding 2-3 usable PCI/e slots with an SLI setup.

[Mark Phelps]

Have you checked with some of the "older" Gigabyte AM3 boards? I have an older GA-890GPA UD3H and it has all that stuff -- including a floppy drive connector.

[Varsel]

Have you checked with some of the "older" Gigabyte AM3 boards? I have an older GA-890GPA UD3H and it has all that stuff -- including a floppy drive connector.

Yes, and several more like it with even more features. Problem is always the same...Crossfire instead of SLI. I looked into the SLI patch for Crossfire. Keep getting conflicting info. Some say it works great, some say it sorta works, & some say its crappy!
Too risky I think..if I wanted risk would skip nVIDIA altogether, and get AMD Crossfire cards.

Anyway, don't know if I checked out ALL the older Gigabyte & Asus boards...posted just in case I missed any!

[Varsel]

Thats going to be your problem. No motherboards that I know of support floppy's along with SATA and SLI.

Your best bet is to get an external USB Floppy drive if you really need it.

Your also going to have a hard time finding 2-3 usable PCI/e slots with an SLI setup.

Yes, I'm well aware of the sticking point...can satisfy every requirement except its either floppy or SLI...not both.

General consensus on many other forums is that if I want Windows 2000 and XP Pro on build, I require regular internal floppy for certain drivers, to repair BIOS via 'boot block', and couple other scenarios I've forgot....and seems there is no substitute (USB floppy, external floppy, DVD/CD, flash drive, etc. So its a choice between want (SLI) and need (floppy).

[wolfen69]

General consensus on many other forums is that if I want Windows 2000 and XP Pro on build, I require regular internal floppy for certain drivers, to repair BIOS via 'boot block', and couple other scenarios I've forgot

Back in the day when I used to use 2000 and xp, I never needed a floppy for any drivers, and bios's these days can be updated while in xp via the net.