The Mother Board

[Telltail]

I was glad to see Benjamin Sun's review of the Asus P6X58D Premium mobo because I'm hoping to begin a build with the P6X58D and two ATI HD5970 graphics cards. I'd also like to fit an Asus E4285 Xonar Essence STX sound card into the system...if possible. But, I don't want to compromise the speed of the video cards.

Based on the graphic of the mb in Ben's review, the Xonar, which requires a PCIe x 1 slot would fit into PCIe slot 1, and the graphic cards would fit into PCIe x 16 slots #1 and #2.

Questions:
1) Will the Xonar fit in slot x1 #1 given the huge size of the HD5970 in slot x16 #1?
2) If I can't fit the sound card in slot x1, and have to put it in the third x16 slot at the bottom of the board, will the video cards still both be running at x16 or will they be running at x16 and x8?

Thanks for your help with this
tt