I dont have my graphics card in the top slot... is this affecting anything performance wise?

It might take longer for the graphics to get to your monitor if they have to travel further

depends on your motherboard. look at the pci section of your motherboard manual. itll tell you which slots to use youre video cards in.

Well theres two PCIe 16 slots and its in the second one..
But since they're both the faster slots it shouldnt affect anything should it?

Shouldnt cause an issue

On some motherboards some PCIe slots cap at x8 (or lower). Just look in your motherboard manual to see if any on your motherboard do this

I doubt it will bottleneck a gpu @ 8x. Unless he has like a 980+

Some motherboards do have a specific slot to use when running single cards. Best to look at your manual and see if it's correct.

It really doesnt matter though.

They usualyl say to use the top slot, because the second is usually @ 8x speed. But still, It doesnt really matter.

It doesn't really matter that much, the difference between 8x and 16x only shows if you're massively overclocking the card and need to use the entire VRAM and bus of the card. So if you're running 4K monitors with a lot of MSAA and tessellation, you might feel a difference. Might.

However, as mentioned not all boards like having the 1 card inserted into the x8 slot as opposed to the top x16 slot and might cause system instability. This is quite rare though.