PCI Express 2.0 x16 Video Card on PCI Express x16 Motherboard?

They are backwards compatible.

Multi-GPU solutions differ on the chipset. P35 supports Crossfire I think.

Crossfire is supported. Intel P35 chipset is present together with 2 16x PCIe slots

Hey, on this same vein... I recently installed a 2.0 card in my system, and like the previous poster, my mother board is only PCI-E x16... The card works ok in my system, but it actually doesn't perform as well as the old x16 card I replaced. Is this just an unavoidable problem related to down-throttling for the old x16 bus, or is there something I can do to tweak it and make it perform better?

I'm running an Asus P5K Deluxe MB, with a BFGTech GeForce GTX 280 vid card...

I've tried updating the drivers, which didn't help... any thoughts? ideas? some bit of info you can club me over the head with while calling me a noob? lol  

Thanks in advance...

Have you got the correct drivers installed? and what was your previous graphics cards?

As far as I know I do... Nvidia just releases those packages that cover a bunch of different models of cards...

the old card was an EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS... It burned out on me forcing me to replace it...

Well it defo should not be performing WORSE than your old one. I'd suggest updating to latest drivers from Nvidia...yours wont be upto date if you used the ones that came on the CD.

Well, as I said in my previous post, I already tried that once... I downloaded the latest drivers right after I got it installed...

any other ideas? anyone?

What CPU do you have? You are likely bottlenecking.

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, 2.4 Ghz

if the CPU were bottlenecking the graphics, wouldn't it be running at 100% while I'm pushing the graphics card? cause I'm not seeing it go much over 40%...

Any other thoughts on this anyone?

Your mobo specs sheet doesn't specify PCIe 2.0 X16. That is probably your bottle-neck as your board is PCIe X16. Spec sheet here:

http://www.asus.com/Product.aspx?P_ID=0e9NyGEDLjtBRtyB