Okay, long story short, i'm looking to upgrade my video card, problem is that my board being a Gigabyte GA-M720-US3, uses PCI-E 2.0 standard, and most of my upgrade options are using 2.1.
google offers varying answers to my query, so i'm asking here whether i can park a more modern card (using a radeon 4000 series at the moment) with a minimum of fuss.
As far as I know you should be able to. Might not get the most out of it, but that's to be expected.
As I understand it (ie, without going and looking this stuff up, because I'll end up drooling over hardware and not getting anything done for the next week) 2.1 should fall back to 2.0 without problems. Given the information here (http://www.pcisig.com/specifications/pciexpress/base2/), I suspect the difference might to be terminology rather than actual; worst case, it'll run slower. Best case, it'll just work.
That 's basically in case anyone else might be interested in the more fine details, if they come looking later; not because I believe Mao to be wrong, but because there's nothing here to say if it worked or not. ;-]
Same design as USB; if it fits in the slot it'll just work. However the older motherboard won't be able to use any newer hardware or extensions so yeah it may end up in a slower bus than it was intended for. As long as the motherboard doesn't complain about something in being incompatible with the newer board for some strange reason it'll work fine. some boards are known to be fickle but gigabyte should be good.
Ok, again with the necro-post, littlekreen, this one worse than the last. Please stop doing it. If you're not familiar with our rules about this stuff, please take the time to read them.