Can this Motherboard take a GTX 9400 or similar card

JoshAraujo

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Nov 28, 2014
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Yesterday a friend of mine cam to me with a unique problem.
He has a, well I dont really know how old, PC (It was probably around when Troy fell)
The Motherboard it has is this - http://www.mercury-pc.com/product-spec.php?productid=53
He wants to put in a used card (Something along the lines of a GTX8600 or 9400) for HD movies and light gaming
Yes, as you can imagine its got 1gig of DDR RAM and a 2.0GHz Intel from the Prohibition era

But can it take and run a card like the 9400 or 8600?
The description in the link is very vague in that it only says - PCI Slot

Thanks
 
The board has 2 PCI slots, 1 AGP slot, and 1 CNR slot. You have to make sure you get an AGP version of the card for it to work. I think the 6xxx series for Nvidia was the last of the AGP cards, there might be a few 7xxx cards that did both agp and pci-e.
 

Saberus

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That board only has PCI, AGP, and CNR slots. No PCI-e. if the card is PCI, it will work. If it's AGP, it may work, as there's a few different keyings.

Saying this PC was around when Troy fell or during Prohibition isn't far off. This thing is OLD, it can take PC133, and a Socket 478. What does he call light gaming? This thing would be stressed playing flash games. You can drop $100-$250 bucks and get a much better system than this fossil.
 

Saberus

Distinguished
PCI is the ancestor of PCI-e. It's a 32-bit interface running at 33MHz, and had not only a speed advantage over what it replaced (ISA), it did away with the need for IRQ settings and kicked down the door to let Plug and Play come to the party. Those of us who remember having to set the jumper blocks on ISA cards were awed at the ease PCI brought to building PCs.

PCI exploded across the market as it was an open architecture, which is regarded as the reason it stomped Intel's MCA bus.

PCI fathered many decendants:

AGP, built on the design of PCI and for many represented what a 32-bit bus could be when driven to the limit with the 8x standard pumping at 266MHz.

PCI-X, a 64-bit extension of the original, and backwards compatible. It was made for the server market and it's growing need for more throughput.

And PCI-e, which moved away from a parallel bus to a series of serial busses. PCI-e has now filled the role that PCI used to, allowing enormous levels of throughput that would be impossible on a parallel bus, as serial busses are pretty much immune to data skewing that cripple attempts to push parallel data faster. This move to serial output is is how we get the naming for connector sizes, where the number after the x is the number of serial lanes the card uses or slot supports.