Any way to install a NVMe card in this MoBo M4A88TD-V EVO ?

M4A88TD-V EVO

Assuming I could use a NVMe card with an adaptor maybe, what type exactly the NVMe card would be?

I suppose an Optane card would be too much to ask...

Thanks

I believe that an NVME SSD would require a PCI-E X4 slot. (You can insert such a card into an X8 or X16 slot.)

You could buy a PCI-E slot form factor SSD, or an M.2 card and use it with an adapter. (Make sure it's X4.)

The motherboard that you list has PCI-E 2.0 slots rather than PCI-E 3.0. 2.0 has a bandwidth of 500 MB/s per lane, so at X4 that'd be 2 GB/s. That could limit the fastest SSDs.

I don't know what the consequences are of using an NVME SSD in a system that does not support NVME. I think it'd be OK, and I doubt that there'd be a significant speed penalty in a desktop PC. (Servers would benefit more.)

As far as I know, and Optane SSD functions like a regular SSD. If you wanted to use a small Optane drive for caching, that would require a 7th generation Intel CPU with a matching motherboard, but that's not what you want to do.

One might ask what the heck you're doing trying to mate new tech to a 2010 motherboard, but that would be rude.

The board advertises USB 3.0, SATA 6gb/s, DDR3 and PCIe 2.0. It does not mention newer USB-C, NVMe, DDR4, PCIe v3.0 or Thunderbolt. That tells me your board is before PCIe NVMe and the Intel Optane. As suggested, you'll need a third party adapter to use a PCIe NVMe cards and even the Samsung 960 and 970 series will probably benchmark below 3000/2000, but it's still going to be +3 times faster than SATA III at 6gb/s.

If you want to boot from the nvme drive, you can use Clover/Duet boot manager on a usb stick.
Braver geeks can insert an nvme module into their mobo bios.