The H97 board has 3 PCIEx16 slots. Can it be used with PCIEx1 card (eg. Sound Blaster Z)?
Yes it's backward compatible. On a side note maybe I should paraphrase the sentence from one of my previous post to get this clear. In 99.99% of all the applications today, those who are doing rendering, encoding and decoding would notice that the main/default encoding/decoding method is always cpu based, with the extra check box allowing you to use your gpu for hardware acceleration for commercial softwares. There is no option to uncheck or disable cpu based processing. When the former is checked, it merely enhances the rendering speed while creating a less taxing load on the cpu during encoding and decoding.
Your cpu still runs in a certain level stress mode even when the hardware acceleration is on. You would never hear any renderer who says that yes, I have rendered my work purely on gpu horsepower without the use of cpu. So when you enable the hardware acceleration, your cpu is (still working and) optimised in such a way that those processes which are more gpu efficient are passed on to the gpu instead while the cpu is still running the other processes. The source code of encoding/decoding has always placed the emphasis on cpu optimisation first before anything else (for eg, gpu hardware acceleration in this case). Therefore the latter is more often than not an enhancement feature only and not the very main focus on encoding/decoding even till today. There is no gpu enhancement to talk about if the softwares cannot even utilise the cpu well enough.
You can try by upgrading you gpu only and retain your cpu. Enable your hardware acceleration, and the playback might stutter even with the upgrade. Up the horsepower of your cpu and that is another story. Do drop the idea that hardware accelerated processes is merely a gpu decoding task which has got nothing to do with the cpu. Hope you can understand that I am not talking about some textbook or google definitions here but the facts which are actually happening in real time.
#Coming from a fy student researching and conducting test studies on the current and future video coding/compression standards.#
Anyway for a normal pc gamer, I think the most impt thing is to strike a balance between the components and enjoy the new rig.
#Wot.
