BW Home This Week in BW Daily Briefing Investing Global Business Technology Small Business B-Schools Careers Lifestyle Personal Finance Tools and Scoreboards Special Reports Video Views Search BW Forums Executive Conferences In Hardware All CNET The Web CNET Hardware Labs Inside the Labs Waiting for the next bus Three new buses for the desktop PC are about to make your current system obsolete. By Daniel A. Begun Labs manager, CNET Reviews Longtime PC users know better than to get too attached to their systems. Before you realize it, the technology in your desktop is outdated and too slow for the latest and greatest components and applications. Worse yet, some technologies simply fade away, making peripheral upgrades impossiblelook at what happened to ISA and VL-bus expansion slots. Well, get ready for not one, not two, but three new technologies for desktops that will render your current PC obsolete. AGP 8X The first of the new technologies that you are likely to see is AGP 8X, the final speed step for the accelerated graphics port before it too starts fading away in 2004 (see PCI Express below). A single expansion slot on a system motherboard, AGP provides a fast and direct connection between a graphics card and system memory. AGP 8X supports a potential throughput of more than 2.1GB per secondtwice the speed of today's AGP 4X solutions. There are already a few AGP 8X graphics card on the market now, such as the | |
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