What kind of PCI slot is this?

Solution


There is a PCIe x16 slot above the black PCIe x1 slot you showed in the picture. The ones you showed are not the correct one, the one you didn't take a picture of is the slot you need.
1) for best performance upgrade ram in matched pairs. Same speed, same size, and in whatever ports your mobo requires for duel channel operation (typically 1 space apart for each matched set, but some boards put matched sets together... which is annoying). So upgrade to 2, 4, or 8GB or ram, not 3.

2) a cheap GPU will be better than iGPU every day of the week, especially on older systems. For one they will have their own dedicated high speed memory, plus they tend to have better processors to begin with.

An explenation of PCI:
PCI (the white slots in your first picture) is an old, but generally adequate interface that was used for everything from modems to graphics cards. As GPUs got better PCI was not longer fast enough to feed the processors so AGP (advanced Graphics Port) was made to off-load the strain of the GPU. On the server side of things PCI ran into some other bariers, which brought about 2 other similar standards of PCI 64bit (which is like a really long PCI slot) also known as PCI-X. These were better capable of server loads on things like RAID controllers, and heavy network equipment. PCI Express (known as PCIe) which is a parallel implementation of traditional serial PCI, quickly took over the workloads of AGP, PCI, PCI-X, and even more obscure standards such as AMR. Some of these legacy ports are still included because some people have some irreplaceable parts that require these slots (specifically old high end sound cards), but for most people the slots simply go unused these days.

The nice thing about PCIe is that it comes in a varieity of different lengths that are suited for different workloads. All PCIe connectors start with a power bus, followed by a set of repeating interfaces for bandwidth. A PCIe 1x port is very short, having only the power and 1 length of bus connectors. PCIe4x is a little bit longer, followed by 8x (rare), and 16x (typically reserved for GPUs). The nice thing about the parallel nature of these ports is that they are highly interchangeable. You can put a 1x device into a 16x slot, and it will work fine. Conversely, you can put a 16x device into a shorter slot (provided it has an open end on the back of the slot), and they will work fine... all be it likely choked for bandwidth. A lot of motherboards also have slots that look like a 16x slot, but are only wired for 8x, which can confuse things, but it makes sense from a design perspective, and typically does not cause issues.
For the revisions of PCIe we have version 1.1 which was 250MBps, v2 which was 500MBps, and our current v3 which is an astounding 1GBps. This is per port, which means that a 16x PCIe3 device can transfer 16GBps to and from the device. Literally nothing can take advantage of this yet, and the only reason to move up was because some higher end duel GPU cards were hitting the bandwidth cap (barely) of PCIe2, and because high end cards were beginning to be choked when running at 8x, which is important because most SLi/xFire setups run 2 cards with 8x available to each. So basically you can run a mid-high end new card in an older PCIe2 machine without a bandwidth issue. The overall system may not be fast enough to feed it, but the choke point would be on the ram or CPU, not the interface itself.