Windows 7 - ASRock 890FX Layout

Please take a look at the photo of this motherboard here:

ASRock > Products > 890FX Deluxe4

And tell me how it is possible to use the first PCIe x1 slot at the top, because if you look closely, you will see that it is hedged in by the heatsink below the CPU. I do have a card there, but it may be the reason that I'm having a problem with it, because it is the controller card for my external drives, and the only reason that it fits, is because there is a very narrow slot between sections of the heatsink that the card fits through. At the moment, I'm not certain if anything touches or not. However, most cards are too thick to fit in that slot, and if one used a riser to clear the heatsink, the card would not longer match up with the expansion slot opening.

Probably not a good idea having the card essentially inside that heatsink. As for what would fit in that space, no idea.

Just curious, but is there any reason you can't put that controller card in the bottom x4 slot?

Bottom x4 slot? I guess that you are referring to the lowest x16 slot, that runs at x4 in Crossfire. I will probably try it, but since I had a problem running my sound card in the second x16 slot, I don't know what would happen.

There is a second x1 slot that I forgot about, because my 2 slot video card covers it. The only way that I could use that, is to downgrade to my old BFG 7800 GTX or move my GTX460 down to the second x16 slot...would that work properly? It would then cover a regular PCI slot, which I could better afford.

I wouldn't use that first PCIe x1 slot (PCIE1), as it looks as though the heatsink you mentioned obscures it. You can move the card and put it in the bottom PCIe x16 slot (PCIE5), as a x16 slot will support x16, x8, x4, and x1 width devices.

I'm going to try it, but I'm not very optimistic about it, because I tried running my sound card (Asus Xonar D2X) which is PCIe 1 in the second PCIe x16 slot, and it made fairly loud continous thumping sounds, about every 4 seconds. I just reorganized and put the video card in the second PCIe slot, as I talked about, so to uncover the second PCIe x1 slot and put the sound card there, and it seems to like it.

That seems to indicate that all 3 of the PCIe x16 slots are tied together in a fashion that makes them dedicated to Crossfire. If that is so, I wish that I had made a different choice in motherboards, because I have no interest in either Crossfire or SLI.