Todays video cards in a PCIe x4 port?

Nonsense! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

That's a nice single-slot card.

But no, putting that card into a PCI-Ex4 slot would be a bad idea. It'll hurt the performance a lot.

That fan sticks out pretty far. Looks to me like it would hit a card in the slot next to it.


A 5770 (512MB) is less than 50% faster than a 9800 anyway so it wouldnt be that big of a performance increase.

I would stick with the 9800 until you get a more mainstream motherboard/case. By then nVidia's DX11 cards should be available so you should have better choices anyway.

Dndhatcher, Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm detecting vibes you may be partial to Nvidia much the same as me and MouseMonkey?

I am partial only to the best price/performance tempered by reliability and longevity. ATI is right now generally ahead in price/performance, but as the handling of the grey screen issue has shown they are still not up to nvidia's reliability so I am ambivalent. I have both a 9800 GTX+ and a 5770 (which has the driver stop/recover grey screen problem). I also am not confident of nVidias future as they seem to be focused on GPGPU and not gaming graphics, which is the only thing I currently care about in a graphics card.

Agreed, I would buy a Nvidia card over an ATI card at the same Price/Preformance, But ATI dominates price to preformance now, so I was pretty much forced by Nvidia's suckiness into buying a 4870 1gb over the GTX 260.

I think that card would potentially fit, with it being shorter it wouldn't interfere with the CPU cooler. I was afraid that the reduction in memory would adversly affect the performance that I currently have.

I've had NVidia pretty much exclusively since the GeForce FX was first released, but quite frankly I've been a little disappointed in their blind focus on high end cards. I like gaming, but frankly cannot afford to spend $400-$500 for a graphics card, so like Bob I'm having to look elsewhere. I'd like to see someone (either ATI or NVidia) focus on refining the midstream cards in price/performance/reliability rather than just seeing how fast they can get a card to go.

Thanks for all the great input. I think that for now I will wait to see what happens with the graphic upgrades in the game I play before doing anything.

Nvidia is it least pricing the 470 where its worth comparing to a 5850. The power/heat I think still gives ATI the advantage, even though price/performance is pretty even.

Here is a Good review of how the 480 GTX scales with 16X 8X and 4X PCI-E

http://techpowerup.com/reviews/NVIDIA/GTX_480_PCI-Expre...

Hope this helps!