If you're buying a new motherboard (or whole cpu) read carefully about PCI express. Just because it has a PCI express slot doesn't mean you can use a PCI-E video card in it. There are also non graphics PCI-E slots, which are short slots made for things such as NIC cards providing fast network capabilities... A friend of mine ran into this a little while ago... bought PCI-E graphics card, brought it home, opened up the box and low and behold his PCI-E slot was litte more than 2 inches long! I hated being the bringer of bad news on that one!