PCI-E x16 motherboards

[prophet001]

Hi,
I am looking at the possibility of buying a motherboard with 2 or 3 PCI-E x16 slots but I am stuck at the different "types" of PCI-E x16 slots. For example, intel's badaxe 2 mobo says they have 1 pci-e x16 slot (electrical) and 1 pci-e x16 slot (x8 electrical). What does this mean? EVGA claims to have a motherboard with 2 "true" PCI-e x16 slots. What's with the confusion and why isn't pci-e x16 just simply pci-e x16? Can anyone help me understand this? Thank you,
Preston
p.s. they would be receiving 8800 gtx cards

 

[Heidfirst]

The difference is that it's possible to have a slot that's physically a X16 but electrically connected to fewer lanes than that.
It all comes down to how many PCI-E lanes the chipset was designed to handle & how the mobo deigner chose to split those up.

If you have the money for dual 8800GTX imo I would be going with 680i currently especially as only nVidia chipsets officially are supported for SLI with them.

 

[prophet001]

cool.. this is nice to know
thank you very much for you help
buying a mobo with electrical x8 seems a lot like buying a car with 8 cylinders and 6 spark plugs... what gives
anyway, thank you