I have some more questions. Sorry but I haven't made up my mind yet and the Asus cards are back out of stock at Newegg.
I've read a few threads on the Gigabyte model on their official forums and yes, it seems like there a decent amount of people who can't run their GTX 670 on a Z77 motherboard without frequent lockups.
The motherboard I'm using is the ASrock Z77 Pro4. I've looked the owner's manual over and there doesn't seem to be a setting that will force the video card to run at PCIe 2.0 x 16.
The only relative setting I can find states this;
Primary Graphics Adapter
This allows you to select [Onboard], [PCI] or [PCI Express] as the boot
graphic adapter priority. The default value is [PCI Express].
The motherboard also has a PCI Express 2.0 x 16 slot which, I assume, is for Crossfire installations.
My question is this, since I'm unable to force 2.0 on the primary PCI Express slot would I be able to install a problematic Gigabyte GTX 670 into the 2.0 slot, leaving the 3.0 slot empty, with no degradation in performance? Is installing my video card physically in the secondary PCI Express a slot a valid solution should I happen to encounter a video card with this issue?
I have reached no decisions thus far, I'm simply asking questions.
On a side note; to those of you PM'ing me offering to sell me your video cards I have not replied but the answer is; No thank you. I am not interesting in buying a video card from you.