Awhile ago I needed to upgrade to DualCore. Bought an e4400 and clocked to 2.5ghz. The board I used as an AsRock that allowed legacy DRAM and AGP video. I wanted to next jump to more and better memory(400mhz dual channel) as well as a better PCie video card. So I asked about the most significant drawback of the AsRock board which was its 4x PCie bus speed. At that time the consensus was that 4x was not an issue because the video card I was looking at (nVidia 8600-256mb) would not perform any better with the more standard 16x bus speed. That question comes up again as I consider a new motherboard. The only reason I would get one is to achieve faster video speed so I could use a little autogen and some modest trraffic with max clouds. Today I can only choose one of those three. So, if I keep my present e4400, same 2gb 400mhz memory and my 8600 would I see a worthwhile increase in performance by getting a board with 16x PCie bus speed.

It is an issue.