Video Card Slots and Cards?

I'm building a new computer for gaming. I already have a AMD Athalon X2 5600+ and I'm looking at mobos and video cards.

I've only had AGP video cards before so I don't know about these new PCI slots. What are the main differences between PCI Express 2.0 X16 and PCI Express X1? What is the best type of slot for gaming? Also, can you recommend a decent card for less than a hundred bucks?

Thanks a lot.|||Beware. Nvidia cards are showing up faster benchmarks than ATI Radeon. That being said if you choose anything but an nvidia chipset on your motherboard you might get disappointed, especially if you buy one of the new 700 series chipset motherboards for the AMD CPU. They have started a new spider technology that incorperates display drivers into the northbridge for better gaming and graphics performance and will not work very well or at all with nvidia graphics cards.

PCIx16 2.0 and 1.0 look the same, the 2.0 are faster tech., the 1.0 and 2.0 interchange hardware only that if you use a 1.0 card with the 2.0 slot you will not get the true potential, same if you use a 2.0 card with a 1.0 slot, but either way they will still work...

The ATI 3870 is a good card and will hold its own. It isn't near as pricey as the 8800 series, but also comes standard with GDDR4 that might hold it in the good for a while longer than todays DDR3 cards... Possibly that is the only thing holding it back in performance as of now. Much like DDR3 system ram, the DDR4 hasn't had games to utalize the potential of its technology yet...

As far as motherboards go, choose your chipset wisely, think ahead and figure out where you want to be with your mobo in a year before buying one...|||I believe that agp was limited to 8X and pci express is 16x so heaps better. That said i had one and changed back to agp. Too many bugs.. But that is probably just me.

Hope that helps a little.|||PCI Express is faster than AGP. PCI Express X16 is what I run with an Nvidia 8500 GT / 512Mb made by PNY. This card was purchased at www.tigerdirect.com for $65 plus shipping. Other Nvidia cards are faster than this one but more $$. Good value for the price and runs FEAR, Call of Duty 2 well.