i just saw the site of my mobo K9N6SGM-v MSI and it says, it has pci-e x16 but will give only x8, now i am really stuck, i was going to buy the 9600gt this weekend. i dont understand plss help i have loads of queries

That's as designed. One wonders why they call it a X16 slot at all. Bogus in my opinion. "• One PCI Express x16 slot. (K9N6PGM-FI/F) • One PCI Express x16 slot but only provides x8 bandwidth. (K9N6SGM-V)" http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?... If you have just bought the mboard, if you can take it back or return it, do that and get a mboard that actually does support X16. Some NVidia chipset mboards have 2 PCI-E X16 slots. With some of the NVidia chipsets if two X16 video cards are installed, both run at X8. That's also bogus in my opinion. Read the manual for the mboard before you buy it.

you'll never see the difference

no but will my 9600 work i have loads of queries

It will probably work, but it will only be capable of up to a max X8 speed in that slot. As I said... "Some NVidia chipset mboards have 2 PCI-E X16 slots. With some of the NVidia chipsets if two X16 video cards are installed, both run at X8." Most X16 cards have no problem running at X8 max. There are some cards that don't work - see the link in response 1. "you'll never see the difference" A X16 card in a slot capable of X16 is not twice as fast as a X16 or X8 card running in a slot capable of X8 in the real world. The highest speed is a maximum and isn't used most of the time.

As Tubes said, x16 is NOT twice as fast as x8. It's the theoretical bandwidth that's doubled. If your card isn't taking advantage of the all that bandwidth, you'll see no difference performance between x8 & x16. That goes for AGP too. There was little or no performance difference between 4X & 8X either because the vast majority of cards weren't even saturating the 4X bandwidth, let alone 8X. The K9N6SGM-V isn't a great board anyway...maybe you should think about upgrading that 1st?