Hack 68 Get off the PCI Bus 
If your PC lacks an AGP port, you are stuck with
PCI. You may find a PCI video adapter
(see Figure 7-1) with more video RAM and higher
performance than the card you have now, but that's
about as far as you can go with PCI. If you have an AGP bus connector
on your system board, by all means get down to the computer store and
pick up a late model nVidia GeForce or ATI Radeon card to get
that well-deserved, long-awaited performance boost. An AGP video
adapter can perform 15 times faster than a PCI adapter. It may not
improve your game skills, but you'll better enjoy
the playing you do.
Before you simply grab the latest AGP card and plug it into your
system, you need to know which level of AGP performance and what
voltage your system board's AGP I/O slot supports.
Specifically, will the slot support something better than the
original AGP 1x cards? Will it take an AGP
2x, 4x, or 8x
card? AGP 8x cards are not backwards compatible, so an AGP 8x card
will not run in an AGP 1x, 2x, or 4x slot; the slower slots do not
have the proper clocking or voltage to run an 8x card. Plugging an
AGP 2x card into a 1x slot will not give you the 2x performance
increase you may be expecting; the slot does not provide the higher
clock speed for 2x, and similarly a 4x card will not run as fast as
it can in a 2x slot.
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