Posted 06/29/2008 at 12:37:31am

  I recently purchased  one of these new motherboards with integrated graphics and HD support from ATI.  I thought this would be a great option for my media machine.  I put in a 9850 and later found out that although it had an AM2+ socket it was incompatible with this CPU.  Well, I purchased a second chip to replace it and decided to update my gaming rig.  I picked out the M3A32-MVP MB for the 9850 CPU and moved over the 4gigs of DDR2 1066 that I had purchased for the media center machine. Today I ordered in a HD4870 card to replace my 1900xtx.  It looked like supporting the underdog (AMD/ATI) was paying off on performance/value.

Ok- My last phase on this rig was going to be adding a proper sound card.  As you guys always mention on your podcast and in the mag onboard sound can never compete wiith a proper sound card. I was eyeing out this X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Champion Series that has a nice front connection bay and I can not be sure it is compatible with the M3A32-MVP motherboard. The PCI express on the sound card looks like a much narrower connection than the slots on my board.  Is this sound card truly compatible with this board and only one graphics card?

Killer robots, Alien Menace, Atomic Monsters, Dehumanization, the Random Assailant, Technology Is Not Your Friend, and most recently Genetic Horror. Things worth gaming about.