My 2 y.o. motherboard is a dinosaur

[Snookslayer]

Built my first computer 2 years ago with no experience and a lot of help from this forum. Unfortunately, I bought a cpu / mobo combo. (FX 4100 and Gigabyte GA-78LMT-S2P). My ignorance was bliss, until a few months ago when I started tinkering and realized my limitations...

1. The mobo only has USB 2.0, as opposed to all new one's with 3.0... No big deal really, I don't need to transfer vast data onto thumb drives that much quicker, but meh.

2. After installing a new SSD I quickly realized my mobo only has SATA II rather than SATA III which comes standard nowadays. The SDD is still faster than my old hard drive, but it should be even faster.

3. I replaced my old case fans which were hooked directly to the power molex and installed two new PWM fans. That's when I realized my mobo only has ONE case fan header which of course only has 3 pins... hence no fan control. Every modern mobo has at least 2 fan headers and they all have 4 pins. Ugh...

4. So I recently decided to get a TV Tuner card and after some research I settle on a card with PCIe x1. So I look at my mobo and where is this slot located? That would be DIRECTLY below my giant video card which leaves absolutely no room for the PCIe x1 slot. I can't understand why anyone would put it there. What, they didn't expect a video card to be installed?

I'm sure there are other things I haven't discovered yet about my mobo which will disappoint me. Thank goodness I don't overclock because I bet it would suck. I had planned on someday upgrading to an i5 processor, which is why the prospect of laying down more money on a new AMD mobo is depressing.

 

[Karsten75]

The reason for the location of the PCIe-x1 slot is that probably the lanes are used by the PCI2 x16. SO you can't run both concurrently?

 

[Snookslayer]

I don't know if I can use both slots because my video card too big to test it. Maybe your right that the lane is already used.

Either way, my only other option (other than buying a new mobo) is to pick a TV tuner card with PCI slots rather than PCIe x1. But I wanted to avoid that... seems like most the better quality tuners only use PCIe x1.