Athlon64 and Opteron chipsets are not compatible with Matrox RTX hardware.

Alex, how the heck did you get such an expensive video card into an aging system like that? That's a heck of an upgrade you did! You would have done well to get a little more inexpensive video card and upgrade the memory too.

As far as your ideas for your next system, what's wrong with Intel Dual-core? Yes, the Athlon implementation of the technology is better, but so is their implementation of quite a few different technologies. The fact is, the Intel chips will work for you and give you a killer system - so there's your substitution.

As far as Matrox's compatibility pages - don't bother. They aren't putting any time into the RTX line anymore - just basic updates when absolutely necessary. As far as SD goes, the industry isn't interested anymore, because the functionality is capped. Everything is looking to HD functionality, because even if you aren't going to use it now, you cannot be competitive if you don't have the functionality for use in the future. Doing your post in HD isn't such a bad line to give to customers, either.