Selecting the Video Bus

This very short article tries to put some sense into the nonsense of understanding terms and prices when buying hardware.

When considering an upgrade of the motherboard, or when intending to buy a new PC, most people don't take into consideration the SYSTEM BUS.
Before buying a video card, the system bus has to be taken into consideration.

Getting better performance out of a video card and accelerator does not rely solely on the amount of VRAM it has.
A high-speed bus will enable better and faster use of the attached peripherals: video card, hard-disk controller, and network controllers.

A high speed bus would be:

1. PCI - Peripheral Component Interconnect.
   or
   
2. VESA Local Bus - Video Electronics Standards Association (VLB).
   

Both PCI and VLB busses and expansion slots give the peripherals 32-bit direct access to the CPU.

To put this in simpler words: data can be transferred at the same rate as the CPU's clock speed, while the 'old' ISA bus has a speed limit of 8 MHz.

Assuming the card is made for a local bus slot, its performance will be no less than 4 times better (and faster) than the same card in a 16-bit ISA slot.

See also:Selecting a Video Board

Photograph copyrights by Intel Corporation

Written and edited by UDI Latarre