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I'm a bit rusty on my hardware nowadays since I finished setting up my PC upgrade which turned out to be an additional PC at home about several months ago.

Well, it's a conservatively overclocked machine featuring a Mobile Athlon CPU, Epox board (both great for overclocking by the way), some thermal paste, 5,000rpm cpu fan, 7200rpm ATA 133 Hard Drive, 512mb Geil DDR memory (yea, no budget yet for dual channel), HEC dual fan power supply, 3 casing fans (front & side intake, 1 back exhaust. How I wish I could have a top blowhole!) samsung dvd combo player and rounded cables. (and hours upon hours of tweaking and doing stability testing with Prime95)

There's already tons of resources on the net on OC (not obsessive compulsive...hehe) overclocking, but if you have any questions, feel free to email me at umbertoeklat@gmail.com or simply make a comment here.

Now going back to AGP...
I don't regularly upgrade my video card so I never knew the evolution of this motherboard slot. Basically, I didn't plan to upgrade my old Video card (saving up for a GeForce 6800 Ultra or Radeon 9800 XT) also since I have some older video cards lying around the house so I found it a bit confusing when I started inserting those old vid cards into my old PC.

The problem was the old ones won't fit directly on my AGP slot. The slots are keyed differently.

regular PCI from my old PC.

my old vid cards.

Here a rundown on all the PCI types:
1. Original PCI -- 32 bits/33 MHz, 1 Gbps, 5V
2. Wide PCI -- 64 bits/33 MHz, 2.1 Gbps
3. Fast/wide PCI -- 64 bits/66 MHz, 4.3 Gbps
4. Fast/wide 3.3-volt PCI -- 64 bits/66 MHz, 4.3 Gbps, 3.3V
5. PCI-X -- 100MHz, 133MHz, 266MHz, or even 533MHz. 1.5V/0.8V
6. Narrow PCI-X -- Just a physically narrowed PCI-X.
7. PCI-Express -- new. Signaling is both serial and parallel. There's serial signaling on each line, at 2.5GHz with an 8bits in 10bits encoding; and you can have up to 16 lines. It's also full-duplex - you can send data in both directions simultaneously.

Also consider other next generation technologies that would surely be adopted mainstream like Dual Core processors, DDR2 memory, Serial ATA (SATA vs. PATA) hard drives, Blue-ray Discs, HD-DVDs, SLI Video (nah, I don't think so. Still too expensive) etc.

Well, that's it for now. I'll try to post some topics on softwares next time. bfn