Maximum PC

Hey!

So... I've got a quick question. Does the motherboard in any way affect the performance of the graphics card? I ask this because a friend of mine came to me with a very interesting tale.

My friend bought an nVidia Geforce GT240. Yeah, so he's not very comfortable fixing it, and so he goes to a computer store and seeks help there. The guy at the store tells him that the graphics card is one of the "latest" models and even if he does manage to put it inside the motherboard (late 2009 model) it wouldn't perform so well. It'd be as bad as the integrated chip that came along with the motherboard.

I just want to know if any of this is true, or if that guy was misleading my friend.

Oh and apparently, the guy at the store is a computer engineer of the highest degree.

Many thanks in advance!

Okay. Now I've learnt something else. It seems the motherboard is actually from 2006, and was manufactured by Asus. No details as far as the model is concerned though...

So, as I was saying... the Motherboard is from 2005... and the store guy now claims that the graphics card won't fit inside it.

The MoBo is equipped with a PCI slot. Not sure about a PCI-e though.

Is he right? Will or won't the graphics card work in that motherboard. I'd like to know the answer to that question.

If the motherboard is from 2006, it most likely has a pcie slot, although there were still AGP mobo's being made then, but it could very well lack any dedicated AGP or 16x slots; depends on the model and the features it has. I would find out what model it is, you can use a program called CPU-Z to find out the model number.


Need model info.

For performance, it also depends on the application being used, if its more CPU or GPU intensive. An old processor can hinder the performance ability of a more modern, fast graphics card in instances of where the program is bound to both cpu and gpu cycles. Some applications, like General Purpose GPU programs, can run independent from the CPU and thus not bound or hindered by a slow CPU. I can put my high end GTX 570's that I have in my i7 PC and dump them into my old e2200 celeron system and have the same performance in GPGPU apps, but gaming would suffer tremendously.

How to check for AGP/PCI-Express
http://www.instantgoodness.com/images/u ... x1_Bus.jpg should help.

Will it affect graphics card performance?
Technically? Yes. Practically? No. There are minute differences in motherboards but the overall point is that all buses are a standard, meaning a PCI-Express x16 slot on a cheap <$100 motherboard will not make any difference than a PCI-Express x16 slot on a high-end >$300 motherboard if you're using one video card.

The only real difference is the PCI-Express version. Motherboards until 2008/2009 that have PCI-Express slots are of the PCI-Express 1.0a or 1.1 type. 2008 and on are PCI-Express 2.0. The difference is PCI-Express 2.0 has double the bandwidth, but I don't think any graphics cards aside from the dual GPU beasts actually need all of it. For an older motherboard in 2006-2007, you'll run into the CPU bottleneck before you run into a bottleneck with using an older PCI-Express version.