Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!

[343guiltymc]

Is the radeon 4770 going to be added for the barebones build?

[mech]

I have a few questions.

What's the difference performance wise of a pciex16 vs a pciex16x2 / 2.0

Would the effects be that detrimental if I were to place a pcie2.0 video card in a x16 slot?

Also, what's the performance differences when putting an AM2+ socket CPU into an AM2 board? Will the performance hit be drastic?

[Warsaw]

Depends on the card. Mid-range ones aren't going to be able to saturate a PCI-e 16x, but the higher end ones will be bottlenecked a bit by it.

With AM2+ in an AM2 socket, you basically cut the Hyper Transport down from 3600MHz to 2000MHz.

[MetKiller Joe]

I'm thinking of getting another motherboard. Could anybody suggest something rock solid that would be nForce?

[=sw=warlord]

I'm thinking of getting another motherboard. Could anybody suggest something rock solid that would be nForce?

Intel or AMD?
If your going for intel, i would suggest the Asus P5N32-SLI Premium.

[paladin]

or MAXIMUS II

[AAA]

How do you determine whether or not your CPU or Graphics card would be bottlenecked by the other?

[Jelly]

If one is high-performance and the other isn't, chances are the high-performance part is being bottlenecked.

[AAA]

...What region of the component (CPU/GPU) would bottleneck??

[LlamaMaster]

They are two separate components? I'm not sure what you are asking. As far as I know GPU won't have any impact on CPU speed, but the CPU has a massive effect on the GPU if it isn't powerful enough.