Need advice on PCI-E cards

[Lance Thornton]

Hi all,

I have a customer that does daytrading on futures. He currently has a PC that I made him, but is starting to show its age. What he needs is one that will support up to eight monitors, he currently has 4 19" Samsung LCD's. I'm currently looking on newegg at the Intel 975X motherboard that has 3 pci-e slots. 1 is x16, 1 is x8 and 1 is x4. My question is this: if I purchase 3 x16 cards that physically fit into the slots, will they downgrade to x8 and x4, or do I have to specifically look for the x8 and x4 cards? Any other advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for the look!

Lance

[doublejack]

If the slots have the full 16x connector but only an 8x or 4x lane, then yes - most pci-e cards will work. They will just operate with less bandwidth. The ones that won't work are more likely to be the high end gaming-centric ones, which a day trader wouldn't need anyway :).

[Lance Thornton]

Thank you!

[BossBorot]

I would just load up on pci cards if I was building it.