Some Graphic card held and advice needed

[mrxian]

Hi folks.
Gotta say, this site has been quite informative so far, but one question remains.

I'm the owner of a motherboard which has the VIA K8M890 chipset. It has a PCIe x16 1.0a slot.
( details: http://www.foxconnchannel.com/product/Motherboards/detail_spec.aspx?ID=en-us0000306 mot )

Now, my graphics cars burned out recently, and I decided to give the board some upgrades. I'm on a budget, so going for expensive things isn't an option, but while I'm putting in the new card, I'll throw in 2gb of extra ram (on top of my 1gb) and a better processor (Probably to this AMD AM2 Athlon 64 X2 4200+ "EE" 2x2,2Ghz).

So, the graphics card was the issue. I was thinking about getting a ATI HD4650 1024MB Gainward card, but that is a PCI-express 2.0 card, while my board has a 1.0a slot.

I did my research, but I can't get anywhere close to a definitive answer. "Yes", "No", "probably" and "probably not" were all answers I got.
Then I got "It'll work unless you have a VIA chipset" answer.

Now I'm confused and worried. Finding older graphics cards is kinda hard in the area where I live, and it seems that everything is made for 2.0 nowadays.

So will the card work? And if not, what card would you advice me to get?
(And will there be a bottleneck problem with that card/cpu combination?)

 

[theAnimal]

PCI-express 2.0 is backwards compatible, so yes it will work. You will not have a bottleneck with that combo.

 

[mrxian]

Are you sure about that?

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the answer and effort you took to help me, but I'd hate to buy a card that I can't use. (Like I said, budget and all that.)
I read some posts about 2.0 cards and VIA chipsets, but I can't find anything definitive.

 

[megame255]

PCI-X 2.0 will work perfectly with a 1.0 slot. It's not like the change from AGP to PCI-X; It's more like the difference between AGP 4X and AGP 8X.

 

[evongugg]

You have the very typical issue that almost all VIA chipsets have with PCI Express cause they didn't follow the specifications to the letter. That means that they have issues with backwards compatibility when a PCI Express 2.0 card is put on it. The fix is rather easy but you need a friend with a non VIA chipset mainboard to flash your graphics card.

 

[mrxian]

Eh, I'm posting this from the recently upgraded computer.
No issues, the video card simply works, it seems.

Going to see if there are any performance issues now.
Thanks for the post, though.