motherboard capabilities???

[92tegracer07]

i have a gigabyte M68M-S2 motherboard...amd 64 athlon X2 240 processor....dual core 2800Mhz...3 Gb of kinston 667 Mhz RAM...500 gb western didgital SATA hard drive..420 watt PSU....HP DVD writer and running windows 7 ultimate....will my motherboard accept a video card with HDMI outputs without me having to upgrade anything? and if so any suggesstions on the video card? thanks!

[guinness]

It is all based on the type of connection you have available on your motherboard for the video card that determines that possibility. Most of the times if you have a PCI Express slot open and/or available, then you will be able to mount an HDMI-ready video card. Just keep in mind that if your specs on the motherboard read PCI Express x16 and you have two slots for video cards open, it will probably put the output of the buses at x8 per video card slot. Very few motherboards, without having to pay for the features, will feature true x16 or even in the extreme cases and HIGH dollar cases, x24 output. Just check in your manual or online to see what the specs on your motherboard are and then determine it from that and what I just told/wrote you. Good luck with your installation. Let us know if you have any further questions.

[92tegracer07]

thanks man....i will keep you posted....

[92tegracer07]

so i went to the Gigabyte website and it says my motherboard has 1 PCI Express port running at 16x....another at 1x for a total of 2 slots...so if im wrong correct me but this would do as you said and drop each slot to 8x?

[guinness]

If you only have one x16 PCI Express slot and are wanting to do HDMI, then you can really only use one card for that and the one x16 slot only because the lanes in that bus will support the HDMI capabilities. They're called x1 and x16 for a reason. Mainly for the fact being that the x16 can handle 16 times the data volumes compared to the x1. Do this and this is just my personal advice. Get the HDMI card and then for your x1 slot, buy a TV tuner card and enjoy the TV with all the channels that cable/dish have, well, the vast majority of them, and be able to record, replay, skip through, and so on like you could with a DVR. Hope this answered your question(s).

[92tegracer07]

thanks for the advice...def helped me alot.....