HD7970 plugged into a PCI E 2.0 motherboard?

[GrieferKiller]

I'm considering upgrading from a GTX 470, to either a HD 7970, HD 7950, GTX 580, or waiting to see what the next generation of Nvidia cards will bring. My current motherboard has PCI Express 2.0 slots. Will the HD 7970 or HD 7950, which are PCI Express 3.0 cards be compatable with my motherboard? Would plugging them into a PCI-E 2.0 slot hamper their performance in current games, in particular, Battlefield 3?

 

[monsta]

Yes the PCI-express 3.0 graphics cards are compatible with 2.0 PCI-express motherboards and should not suffer performance loss in games like BF3 etc, as even the 2.0 cards are not saturating the 2.0 slot on the motherboard.
In the future we may see some 3.0 cards do this , so think of it as next level and by that time you would have upgraded your pc.
Currently pci-e 3 only works with an Ivy Bridge processor and they are not released yet.