(PeteCresswell) wrote:
I've got an EP45-UD3L, but am thinking about getting one of these
things http://tinyurl.com/32h3xcx to speed things up.

But that's an x4 card.

Is there a GigaByte board with x4 slots that I could recycle my
current CPU and memory into?

P45 based motherboards come in two types.

The cheapest P45 boards, run the P45 in P43 mode, providing
only one big PCI Express slot. That's what you bought.
Your board runs only the (1)x16 mode, and has one big
PCI Express slot on it. (If the manufacturer wanted, they
could have placed a P43 chip on the motherboard, and you'd
be none the wiser.)

The rest of the P45 boards, provide two big PCI Express slots.
Either of those slots could take a x4, x8, or x16 card. The
slot wiring runs either (1)x16 or (2)x8, and switches automatically
as a function of card presence detection. So if you installed
a video card and a Revodrive, each would have access to up to
x8 lanes. Or alternately, you could plug an Areca RAID card
with x8 interface, and it would work at full speed.

So what you want, is the P45 board you didn't buy, which was
a few dollars more. That would have done the job, and come
with two big slots to hold anything you could plug into them.

Since we're on the tail end of LGA775 generation, finding a
good motherboard now will be fun. I bought an LGA775 motherboard
a while back, and didn't get the one I wanted. I haven't checked
lately, to see what's left, but I would guess the picking
should be slim. Too many generations of LGA1156/LGA1366
exist, for good LGA775 motherboards to stick around.

Paul