1. That's interesting I thought that the second slot will either work only for VGA card or it will work for all PCIe compatible devices regardless of their speed. So what you mean is that the second slot is compatible only with devices x8 and higher - is this for real ? (I thought PCIe should be backward compatible) Not that this is necessarily a problem but there are still many x4 hardware RAID cards nowadays I might want to consider...
Just to clarify, from my understanding, I believe what shabaa meant was that the 2nd PCIe slot supports up to x8. So 1x-8x PCIe cards should work in the 2nd slot.
Do you already own the Q9650? If not, and if you live near a MicroCenter, you might want to consider this (my 2 cents
):
Your proposed system:
<$482>
$340(NewEgg)...Q9650 CPU
$115AR(NewEgg)...GA-EP45-UD3P motherboard
$27AR(NewEgg)...memory(4GB-800mhz)
Faster proposed system:
<$565 (6GB)>...<$501 (3GB)>
$230(MC)...i7 920 processor
$185AR(NewEgg or MC)...GIGABYTE GA-EX58-UD3R
$150(NewEgg or MC)...DDR3 memory(6GB-1333mhz)...(3GB-1333mhz-$86NE/$90MC)
$482 vs $565...only a $83* difference for a faster processor and memory(*before any taxes and shipping of course). Only a $19* difference if you go for 3GB of memory. The motherboard has everything the UD3P has, except that it has only 1 Gigabit Ethernet LAN. However, it does have an extra x4 slot(though this will probably be blocked by your GPU).
In either case, best of luck with your upgrade!!!