References to good PCI boards and some newbie questions - please help!

Hi,

we are starting a project in our group porting several CPU intensive but simple apps to FPGA platform. We have selected PCI as a way to communicate with a host PC. We have some experience programming FPGAs but not PCI-based (need PCI now due to data transfer speed requirements).

I would be very grateful if someone can answer the folowing for us:

1. What PCI boards you would recommend containing 2-4M total gates and

32MB+ of on-board RAM? We have looked at a couple of development kits from Altera and Xilinx and they all run over $2,000. Is there anything cheaper?

1. Do we have to buy a license to PCI core in order to use the board? I mean we are not going to modify any of the PCI interface functions. For all we care, PCI could have been implemented in a dedicated chip on our dev boards...

Thanks all in advance for your responses!

Valery.