Multiple BlackMagic Intensity Pro Cards in a single i7 PC

[Dennis Ciccone jr]

Somewhat related to your question but …. If you read my other post… Im having issues with using the Intensity card on an I7 intel MB board. It is currently Intel’s only model for the I7’s and I have been reading that other pcie x1 cards have been having issues on the board as well. I would advise you to look into this and possible get a different brand MB if you werent already.

[Tilford Bartman]

The Asus P6T6 Revoultion motherboard has 6 PCIe slots. It has no PCI. It also has no onboard firewire so if you plan to use that you need a firewire card. I have this board with an i7 920 running at 3.6 and 12 gigs of ram. So far it runs excellent.

[Dan Kline]

Dennis, thanks for your response. I wish you the best of luck. Do you have another video card you can try in combination with the BM card? Perhaps from your old system?

If I gather any information outside of this forum, I’ll post it back here.

Dan

[Dan Kline]

Tilford, thanks for that. I did look into that MB and have an outstanding email to Asus as well as on their support forum as to whether non-video cards can go in any slot or if it has slots that are reserved strictly video/graphics out. Do you know whether you can put your firewire card (or any non-video pci-e) in ANY slot? Which color slots do you have your cards in?

Also, unrelated, are you running Vista 64/xp64 or server64?

Thanks!
Dan

[Aristides Tiropolis]

This is interesting. I like impossible projects.

Some questions/comments:

By looking at the product pictures, the intensity and studio card have a different slot gap than the bigger models. This gap is in my eyes absolutely compatible with PCIe x1 slots in desktop motherboards. To my knowledge 98% of x1 slots can be found only on desktop mainboards and not on workstation/server class ones and absolutely not on Mac Pro’s.
The biggest concentration on x1 slots I have ever seen on desktop mainboards has never exceeded the number of 2. How would you physically install the rest of them? The x4,x8,x16 PCIe slot has different slot gaps…unless I’m missing something and maybe I am since Blackmagic states x4,x8,x16 slot support in their website. How is this possible?

As for crossfire getting in the way. I don’t know about that. My mainboard has a second PCIe, that is supposedly there for a second VGA in crossfire mode, but my Decklink sits happily there fully supported on Vista x64. Crossfire is disabled in bios.

I hope this helps.

[Dennis Ciccone jr]

I did try using a TV tuner card and it works fine on the board. It’s not the card and not a defective board…. the board is just not compatible or as of now doesn’t have a compatible bios. It just will not work with the card. I have since read of two other people with different x1 pcie cards having the same problem. One person I talked to already replaced theirs with a Gigabyte MB and got their card working. Im pretty sure since the problem was identical that the Intensity will most likely work on it as well. I need to give up on waiting for an Intel update that corrects it and just buy it now.

[Dan Kline]

Thanks for the info! I was looking into that board (P6T6 WS Revolution) the other day and sent off an email to ASUS tech support about it. I just checked and they replied. Here’s what they say:

“Any PCI-E 1x card will work in any 8x or 16x slot.
Any 8x card will work in any 8x or 16x slot.
And of course a 16x card requires a 16x slot.”

So it looks like I shouldn’t have a problem using multiple intensity cards in this board (woohoo!). And, for anyone else that is interested in a similar setup or has a similar problem w/ finding a board that has enough PCI-e slots for non-SLI/crossfire boards, the SuperMicro X8STE also allows any type of PCI-e card to be installed into any of its slots. It definitely was difficult to find these boards….everyone is so consumed w/ SLI/crossfire!

However, the FoxConn Renaissance X58 i7 motherboard’s PCI-e x16 slots are NOT available for general use. According to their tech support, the the x16 slots are reserved for video/graphics cards ONLY (SLI/Crossfire). I’d imagine the Gigabyte EX58 will be similar since I had the P45 model (GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P) for a Core2Quad and could not get anything other than a video card to work in the x16 slots (this includes a XENA LHe and a BM IntensityPro). Later, tech support confirmed that the slots could only be used for video/graphics cards so I returned that and got an ASUS P5Q-E MB which is great.

Oh, and regarding the slot size question, the slot notches don’t cause a problem when putting a PCI-e x1 into an x16. The offset to the notch is the same, it’s just that there won’t be another notch/wall immediately after the x1 card when it’s seated in the x16 slot. Check out this famous Tom’s HW article about PCI-e. It’s a great read:

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pci-express-scaling-analysis,1572.html

Thanks again
Dan

[Dan Kline]

Whoops, looks like I consolidated Tilford’s and Aristides’ post in my head when I was replying so my post is really a reply to both. Thanks to both of you.

Dan

[Brandon Bates]

A year ago (so this is old news) multiple Intensity cards (and perhaps decklink too?) are not supported. Tried, failed, tried to work around, failed, called tech support, they said no. I think the drivers are only written to expect one card. Don’t know if that has changed. (If it has I’m interested 🙂 Just my experience so far, may be old news though.

[Duncan Ross]

Tilford,

You posted the following;

“Re: Multiple BlackMagic Intensity Pro Cards in a single i7 PC
by Tilford Bartman on Mar 4, 2009 at 3:48:15 pm

The Asus P6T6 Revoultion motherboard has 6 PCIe slots. It has no PCI. It also has no onboard firewire so if you plan to use that you need a firewire card. I have this board with an i7 920 running at 3.6 and 12 gigs of ram. So far it runs excellent.”

I am trying to find out from Black Magic which new x58 Motherboards support the Intensity/Intensity Pro. They are being a bit tight lipped.

Do you have an intensity card running in your set-up?

Duncan