pci e upgrade question

A

anvil

New member
Howdy, I am going to upgrade my video card. My present card is a x1900 and there are no longer drivers for it. My system is Win7. My bus i believe is pci e. Will the newer cards with pci e 2.x work with my old bus, or does this call for a mother board upgrade as well? When I look at the new cards, the slot looks the same on the new cards so hoping I do not need a new mobo as of yet.

thanks in advance

anvil
 
It is supposed to be compatible. However I could never get My Radeon 2900xt or 3970x2 to work properly in an Asus M2R32-Mvp board...which had the original PCI-E design. For some unknown reason the 4870 works fine in it. So imo if you have the $$ definitely get a new board.
 
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anvil said:
Howdy, I am going to upgrade my video card. My present card is a x1900 and there are no longer drivers for it. My system is Win7. My bus i believe is pci e. Will the newer cards with pci e 2.x work with my old bus, or does this call for a mother board upgrade as well? When I look at the new cards, the slot looks the same on the new cards so hoping I do not need a new mobo as of yet.

thanks in advance

anvil
Click to expand...
what's your motherboard? PCI-E 2.1, 2.0 cards are backwards compatible with PCI-E v1 so there shouldn't be any issues, but this of course means there are exceptions like some NVIDIA NF4 chipset boards that have problems with HD 5000 series and newer.
 
It is a foxcon NF4UK8AA. a cheap replacement during a hard time for my old Asus MV series board. It does have an original v1 bus. Unless someone knows for sure, it won't hurt to give it a try then and hope for the best. This has really been a good mobo, even if it was cheap,,and held up and still going strong. Just what is needed when times are tight...

thanks

anvil
 
There have been a lot of problems reported with HD 5000 cards and NF4 boards with PCI-E v1. If you're ok will possibly having to return your card, or change motherboards, then go for it.
 
Thanks much for your info.. I may just keep my old vid card for a while, it too is still good, just cannot get updated drivers for it. Perhaps Omega will release soon drivers for win7 that will work with my Radeon x1900 card

anvil
 
next year will be a good year for doing a whole system upgrade, if you can get the money together. or you may see a great deal this christmas!
 
if your games run fine, there's no real need for new drivers really

unless you need new fixes... i recall gta4 around launch had some issue with certain lights on x1900
 
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