If the CMOS battery connector wasn't in the way behind the PCI-E 1x slot, one *possible* solution could be to fit a 16x card in that slot by cutting out the back of the 1x slot. I suppose an alternative to that would be to get one of those mining expansion cables that plugs into a 1x slot and then provides a physical 16x slot with 1x connectivity. The caveat of this, *if* it works is that you won't get a post screen through the PCI-E card. Instead, you would have to post through the regular onboard VGA and then have the onboard GPU disabled and the GPU in the 1x slot used as the primary display. Once that is done, the computer won't show anything on the screen until the OS boots up. But it can work - I've done it on an ASUS A8V-MX that has an AGP slot only (and I wanted to use a PCI-E GPU in the 1x slot.)