Question new mother board

[txsavoy]

Old system took a dump, repeated failure to post. Old system had gigabyte 990fx mb with fx8350 cpu. I've went with an asus tuf gaming x570plus mb and ryzen 5 3600 cpu. Was using geforce gtx 950 video card, hope it wasn't the problem, I looked at some replacements. Holy crap, batman! Gotta be a rich man for most of them. Question is because the gtx card would sit right over the fan on the mb chipset if I put the card in the top slot, can I use the bottom pclex16 slot instead? Also haven't been keeping up on computer tech, what the heck is an M.2 socket for?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Second question first:

An M.2 socket is for a storage drive ("gum-stick") in the M.2 form-factor. They have different types, SATA and PCI-E (NVMe, usually, although there were a few PCI-E AHCI devices produced early-on in the M.2's history).

Generally, the type that you want is PCI-E NVMe. Since you have the X570 chipset and a Zen2 CPU or above, you can utilize a PCI-E 4.0 x4 drive, most likely, in the top slot. (Check your motherboard manual to be certain.)

The secondary PCI-E x16 slot is fine for a GPU, although realize that that slot may only be electrically x4, and may be wired through the chipset. But for a lower-end card like that, it shouldn't matter much, performance-wise.