Since the introduction of the PCI bus back in the early 90’s, very little has changed in the way that data is handled inside your computer. Hard drive, peripherals, LAN cards, sound cards, USB, firewire - all passing data through the same I/O system as your first 486, the PCI bus running at 33mhz and shifting 133MB/s of data. As an example of recent technology, a Pentium 4 with DDR memory can shift 2.1GB/s across the memory bus. The 4x AGP bus can pass about 1GB of data a second. These are technologies developed essentially to get around the limitations of the PCI.