I have a Shuttle SG31G2 that has an Intel G31/ICH7 chipset, one PCI slot, and one 16x PCI Express slot. I want to add a better gigabit NIC to it, and the PCI slot is already in use by a SATA card. According to this this diagram of the chipset, the x16 PCIe slot is connected differently than the other PCIe slots.
If I put a non-graphics PCIe card into this slot, will it work? Has anyone tried this? This may seem like a dumb question, but this guy was not able to do it on a Shuttle SB81P with a Intel 915G/ICH6R chipset, which has a similar diagram.
Results
This configuration worked for me. I was able to install a network card in my "graphics" PCIe slot, and my onboard video continued to work (at least through the VGA port, the DVI port could have been disabled, but I don't use it so I don't know). This behavior appears to depend on the motherboard, so you may not have the same results with yours.
1 x PCI-Express x16 v1.0 (for graphics cards only)