+ 2 - 1 | § ¶Will PCIe 1.1 cards work in PCIe 2.0 slots
Someone asked me if PCIe 1.x cards would work in a PCIe 2.0 board. Here's what I found:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCI_Express
This says:
In PCIe 1.1 (the most common version as of 2007) each lane carries 250 MB/s in each direction. PCIe 2.0 doubles this and PCIe 3.0 doubles it again.
Then it goes on:
PCIe 2.0
is completely backwards compatible with PCIe v1.x. Graphic
cards and motherboards designed for v2.0 will be able to work with v1.1
and v1.0, and vice versa.
That wiki entry has lots of neat stuff; worth a quick peruse.
So
the short answer is yes; I think this is fine. You just don't get the advantage of the 2.0
spec if you put a 1.x speced card in a 2.0 slot. They did the same
thing with AGP when you had 8x cards in 4x boards.
That's not to say that you won't get goofball cards that don't
work in a select few motherboards; that usually turns out to be the
case but that sort of thing seems to be improving as well in recent
years. I'd trust it enough to try it.