That is completely wrong. The hash rate will be the same on a 1x or a 16x lane. You can also just use the powered UBS 3.0 1x to 16x risers. They work extremely well.
http://www.tested.com/tech/457440-theoretical-vs-actual-bandwidth-pci-express-and-thunderbolt/
https://techreport.com/review/28032/a-fresh-look-at-storage-performance-with-pcie-ssds
http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2591828/pci-express-bandwidth-gpu-bus-width.html
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2656730/pcie-bandwidth-usage.html
https://www.endpcnoise.com/articles/performance-and-pci-express-bus-lanes
It depends a lot on PCI-e generation since yours is Gen3, some stuff may occur becuase GTX970, SLI may use a lot of bandwidth for cross-GPU communication...