The reason I ask is that I just installed an EVGA E-GEFORCE 9800GT 600MHZ 512MB 1.8GHZ 256BIT DDR3 on my P5Q Pro and it works beautifully, plus the price was right at $117 ATT! Ignore the price you see today.

This price beats anything hands down that I can find today for an 8800GT which is an equivalent card to my knowledge. Since I got the 9800 so cheaply, I assume the sale price will be repeated soon enough and I'm a patient person.

The board I'd like to install the 9800GT on is an A8N-E which says nothing about PCI-E 2.0 in the manual. My main objective is the most bang for the buck as this will only be a dedicated folding machine plus a server.

Thanks all.

PCI-E 2.00 just allows for more bandwidth I think, and is otherwise the same "standard" as X16 as far as I know. I don't think the 9800GT will bottleneck on X16 though. I guess one can check out the bandwidth throughput specs of the GPU and that of PCI-E X 16 to make sure.

was PCIe 2.0 when they implemented having two x16 devices running at once, such as SLI and crossfire? I know when it first started, it would drop the speeds to x8 on the two cards, but now they both run at full speed.

@ augie no you wont have any problem running your pci-e 2.0 board in an pci-e 1.0 slot they are exactly the same just 2.0 allows for more than two cards IE: 3 way or 4 way sli and or crossfire or crossfireX where you have an onboard VGA chip and add a second descrete graphics card for lowend crossfire or sli

@ imnuts that happened because your chip set didn't have enough pci-e lanes to allow for 2 way x16 you had 16 lanes which is enough for one card at x16 or two cards at x8

Thanks for all the replies guys, much appreciated. Now for the waiting part.