Gents...need some help on this question:

This is a bit of a diversion from the bulk of the thread, but as it pertains to a R3E I figured this would be the best place.

I'm considering the addition of a third GTX 480 (currently have 2 GTX 480s in SLI plugged into 16x PCI-E slots 1 and 3 on the board). I also own an Asus Xonar Essence STX, which happens to be a PCI Express x1 sound card (currently plugged into the PCI-E 4x slot on the board).

Due to cable/tubing routing management, I would need to put the sound card into the fourth 16x PCI-E slot to provide enough room for the TRI-SLI configuration. This brings up the question: will placing the sound card in a 16X PCI-E slot cause the board to place the three GTX 480s into a 8x/8x/8x bandwidth configuration? They should run in 16x/8x/8x in standard TRI-SLI mode, but I'm unsure if placing a PCI-E sound card into a 16x slot will affect the performance of the GPUs.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.