I jsut ordered a P5K-E board with a p35 chipset. I found it for 99 dollars on sale at frys and picked it up. i am waiting to finish building my system when the new cards come out next month. I was wondering if it will hurt the performance of the card since the board isnt pci-e 2.0.

Most cards don't use anywhere near the full bandwidth of even a 1.0 pci express x16 slot. Its hard to say with hardware that has yet to be released and it may cut a few frames per second, but I would be surprised if it were more than say 1 to 5. You should be fine.

no u should be fine the 9800gx2 doesnt even require pcie 2.0. the new cards coming out r going to be like maybe 20-25% faster so it might use the full bandwidth of x16 but it shouldnt require pcie 2.0. u might get a few fps difference but it shouldnt be a real bottleneck. the only bottleneck i can see is the cpu these days u need a high end cpu to fully utilize high end cards. the next gen of cards i think u would need a cpu over 3.0ghz to get the full potential.

^ As he said.

Not too sure about the CPU bit though.

^^ well it depends on the game really, anyways it won't hurt the performance either

There is a nice article on cpu scaling in games at http://www.guru3d.com/article/cpu- [...] cessors/11