The setting for video cards in the specs indicate 1 x PCIe 2.0 x16, I'm dual booting Ubuntu 9.10 and XP Spk2 with 4 GB RAM, Intel Core 2 CPU 6320 1.86 GHz. There are video cards out there that are PCIe 16x 2.0 that list with 10.1x. Before I spend money on a 'better' card than e-GeForce 6600 256MB R 1.0, will the board make use of/accept the 10.1x? If so, what card would you recommend for around $100? And what is more important for graphics use, Core Clock speed, Stream Processors, or Memory Clock? Do these values work separately or are they paired values? For example: # Core Clock: 750MHz # Stream Processors: 640 Stream Processing Units # Memory Clock: 800MHz (3.2Gbps)
They are all important to the performance of the card. But you cannot compare the number of stream processors or the core clocks of an ati card to an nvidia card. They use completely different architectures and work differently. I am not sure what you mean by the values being linked. I know that when I am overclocking my gpu by default the core clock and the shader clock are linked. So when i move one up, the other also moves up. I think you are talking about direct x 10.1. The motherboard will not effect your ability to use direct x 10.1. The best card around $100 would be the 4770. But you will need to make sure your power supply can handle it. Do you know what kind of psu you have? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150369
Bit by bit I hope to make this a better machine...I updated the power supply to an Antec 650w Earthworks a while back. Thanks for the response.