I have an old Dell D430 whose LCD inverter died. I took the whole display panel off and have been using it as sort of a thin client, but the onboard Intel 945GM graphics chip is uninspiring.

It has two mini-PCI-e slots underneath. Has anybody tried something like this for running a desktop gfx card?

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Mini-pcie-to-2 … 2248390509.html

I'm not expecting brilliant performance out of PCI-e x1 but would be nice to have a bit of an upgrade. I also have a dock with a single 32-bit PCI slot but it's too narrow to fit a GPU with a fan. I'd rather use PCI-e if I can.

There is even a BIOS setting for choosing whether the onboard chip or an external card should be the default GPU, but it might just be for the dock. Not sure if that setting affects a PCI-e card.