PCI1 compatible Graphics Card Question

[Chrishsote]

Hello, I've been running happily on my old rig for a while, and yes it is old - a ALiveSATA2-GLAN motherboard for one. Which best I know is limited to PCI express 1.

Now my graphics card (An old RADEON HD 4870 512Meg) just blew out hard on me, and I need to replace it, but this is where i run into as problem.

best I know what I have will run PCIE1 cards happily and PCI2 cards happily but choked at the speed of the PCI slot. PCI 2.1 and above I think is not usable in what I have. Now darn near everything I'm looking at these days is 2.1 or above.

Any recommendations on what I can get which will run - I'm guessing damn near every card out these days will be more powerful than my old one. Any recommendations on what will work for my rig, and where (Uk based preferably) would stock it. Since I'm guessing anything I can use will be quite old and thus cheap I'd prefer to go with the best card my rig can run.

Thanks

Chris

 

[aicom]

PCI express is backwards and forwards compatible. You can run the latest PCIE 3.0 GPU in your PCIE 1.0 slot or a PCIE 1.0 GPU in a PCIE 3.0. The limit here is going to be your PCI bandwidth. It's going to be like running PCIE 2.0 at x8. It shouldn't bottleneck the mid-range GPUs too much, but it's going to really hurt the performance of the big powerhouse GPUs like the 680 and 7970.

 

[Chrishsote]

Oh, cool. I'd heard 2.1 broke the backwards compatibility thing with some motherboards - must be my mistake. thanks

Chris

 

[aicom]

It shouldn't if the manufacturer implemented the PCI-E specification correctly.