H77M PCIe slots

Mikesin wrote: I have a H77M board that I purchased several years ago but have never used in anger. I would like to convert it to a HTPC using a quad DVB-T tuner PCIE card for TV recordings. Can I use the PCIE slots for this purpose - the manual can be read to imply that these slots are for Crossfire cards only. Thanks in anticipation  Mike

I hope you aren't anticipating anger, or experience it, when you use your board.

PCIe slots are basically for generic use, with added support in the UEFI/BIOS for specialized things like Crossfire, SLI, and NVMe support, for example.

So you certainly can use a PCIe TV tuner card in either PCIe slot. The tuner card itself will have requirements for the number of PCIe lanes it needs to operate. The PCIE1 slot is an x16 lane slot, and the PCIE2 slot is an x4 lane slot. What is the PCIe lane requirement of your TV card?

The CPU provides 16 PCIe lanes to those two slots, shared between them. If you have an Ivy Bridge i5 or i7 processor, you'll have PCIe 3.0 lanes. All other compatible processors (Sandy Bridge, i3 and Pentium Ivy Bridge) provide PCIe 2.0 lanes.

When you install the TV card, clear the UEFI/BIOS with the BIOS/CMOS jumper on the board. That also resets all the UEFI options to their default values, so you'll need to reset them to any non-default values you use. You can save any non-default UEFI option settings in a Profile before you clear the UEFI/BIOS, to restore them easily.