8x pci-e 7900gs - worth it

Help guys.
Just got a new ECS C19-A SLI motherboard. Went with this board because my msi sli compatable board was DOA and after looking around the ECS board with the same set of features was retailing for £80 cheaper, a big big difference.

Read lots of reviews about buying this board as I was a bit unsure of why exactly it was so cheap. Turns out most reviewers were raving it was as good, if not better than most of the more expensive, branded motherboards out there.

Unfortunately I missed one thing in the reviews. It turns out that there is a glitch with this board that means that even though it has 2 16x pci-e interfaces, a single card will only run at 8x speed and there is nothing I can do about it.

2 things then please.

1) Is there anything i can do to get the full 16x support?

2) How much difference will I notice using a xfx 7900gs 256mb graphics card on 8x pci-e rather than 16x??? Will it make a massive difference to the performance of a high end card like this?

I'd be surprised if there was a noticeable difference. Although I haven't really kept up to date, when 8x AGP was dumped in favour of PCI-E, the graphics cards of the day (6800 series) were barely using 4x AGP bandwidth.

Bearing in mind the PCI-E bus runs at 100MHz as opposed to 66MHz of the old AGP slot, then I'd say it will cope just fine with a 7900GS.

Thats what I thought. Cards rarely take up all the available bandwidth of the slot so I thought the difference would be negligible. Apart from this it is an absolutely stonking board for the money and I was loathed to return it for something that would turn out to be a non-issue anyway. If anyone thinks any different let me know.