Bus Architectures for the A+ Certification Exams

Part of the A+ Certification All-In-One For Dummies Cheat Sheet

Another term for the expansion slots on a computer’s motherboard is bus slots. A number of different bus architectures have been developed over time. For the A+ exams, you need to be able to identify the differences between each of these bus architectures and know which ones are more popular today.

Architecture	Bus Width (In Bits)	Speed
ISA	8/16	8 MHz
MCA	32	10 MHz
VLB	32	Speed of local bus
EISA	32	8 MHz
PCI	32/64	33 MHz
AGP	32	66 MHz (1x), 133 MHz (2x), 266 MHz (4x), 533 MHz (8x)
PCMCIA (laptops)	16	33 MHz
PCI-X	32/64	66/133/266/533 MHz
PCIe	32	1 to 4 GHz