SLI with MoBo

[draytalon]

I have an ASUS M3A78 Motherboard, not the T or EM versions, the good old original M3A78. My question is this, at the moment i am running an Nvidia GeForce 8400GS 512mb card, i need to know about upgrading to a better DDR2 card, can this MoBo take SLI feature through the small PCI-E 2.0 (white on my board) expansion slots, or do i need to just buy the one card that fits the blue PCI-E slot where the 512 is running now. I am not 100% sure what slots are what, need a little info on this so i don't buy unnecessary items as my wife will not be pleased, lol.

Regards

Dray

 

[trapper]

The slot your 8400 is in is a 16x PCIe slot. The shorter, white one is a 1x PCIe slot (you should have two of these). The bad news is that you can only use the 16x PCIe slot for a new GPU, so you can't use sli.

Now the good news is that you don't need to buy a ddr2 GPU, any PCIe GPU will work (ddr2 or ddr3, etc). The ddr2 requirement is only for the actual ram modules.

 

[draytalon]

So basically i can put in any GPU, even though i can only run DDR2 memory, i was looking at this card.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=7040152&Sku=E145-0572

 

[geofelt]

Sell the 8400, replace with the GTX570; a great upgrade.
The ram used on the motherboard or graphics is totally separate and has no connection.

One thing to check is the power of your psu. You will need a quality 550w psu for a GTX570.

 

[trapper]

The reason you cant use DDR3 ram in your mobo is the connector type and how the mobo's and CPU's architecture uses the system ram. Video card ram use used wholly by the GPU and thus is not subject to motherboard restraints.

Depending on what PSU you have (as geofelt has said) the 570 is a great card, especially with those discounts.

 

[draytalon]

I am using a 1000w PSU, so there should be no problems there.

Thanks guys appreciate the info and help.

Regards

Dray

 

[draytalon]

Best answer selected by draytalon.