PCI-E 1.1 and 2.0 help

[doomsdaydave11]

Hi, I'm a budget gamer and am planning to get a e8400 within the next 3 months to replace my AMD 3500. Right now I am trying to decide whether to spend the extra $$ on a PCI-E 2.0 slot instead of the same old PCI-E 16x (not sure if its 1.1 or 1.0). Is there a real difference between the two slots? Is it worth $40+ USD? I'm not really an overclocker, and it seems that all those high end boards have lots of overclocking features-- and they're the only one's with PCI-E 2.0. I don't want to pay the extra money for features I don't even need, unless it's worth it for that slot.

 

[chookman]

Current GPU's will not utilise the extra bandwidth of PCI-e2.0, although this could change in the future i cant see it being soon. The only other difference is power, PCI-e2.0 slots actually get supplied with twice the power from the motherboard of that of PCI-e1.1. Although this is overcome by the power connectors (6pin and 8pin) on the GPU's PCB itself. To me the only reason to get X38, 780i or 790FX (currently only chipsets with PCI-e2.0 support) is to have full 16x Crossfire support, full 16x SLI OR Quadfire support respectively.