Is a 7970 compatible with PCIe 1.0 16x

Hey, guys. 

I currently have an old stock HP motherboard with a Core 2 Quad @ 2.33 GHz, and 8 GB of DDR2 533 MHz RAM and an 850 watt PS.

My question is this: I'm looking to buy a Sapphire AMD Radeon 7970, but I'm concerned it will be bottlenecked by my Gen 1 PCIe 16x slot. 

Along with all my other stats, would the card run ok, or would it be significantly bottlenecked to the point that it would  work as well as a 150-200 dollar card. 

Thanks in advance!

-Alpha Spartan A

You will be just fine the 7970 is a great card so is the 7950 get what ever one has the best price.

Proof http://www.anandtech.com/show/5458/the-radeon-hd-7970-reprise-pcie-bandwidth-overclocking-and-msaa

That's great to hear. Should I be concerned about my CPU or RAM (or anything else I didn't mention, for that matter) bottlenecking the card? I didn't any information about the build they were using for these tests. 

In some games it will be held back by your CPU but you will still see fps increase in all games.  I am not sure what your current card is but I would reccomend the MSI 7950 that can be had for $220 and you can save some money for future upgrades or somthing if you overclock it a bit its about the same as the 7970 at stock but the 7970 is great too if you want the best.