PCI EXPRESS HAS gotten a bit of a bad rap, at least on the graphics front, because it hasn’t yet offered a significant performance boost over AGP 8X. Today’s games and applications weren’t designed with PCI Express in mind, and they don’t really take advantage of its 4GB/sec of bandwidth. However, PCI-E has enabled some interesting new budget graphics cards. Rather than relying solely on on-board memory, these cards also leverage a portion of system memory, which thanks to PCI Express’ plentiful bandwidth, can offer pretty decent performance.
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