PCI Express (PCIe) was introduced in 2002 as "Third Generation I/O" (3GIO), and by the mid-2000s, motherboards had at least one PCIe slot for graphics ... serial lanes (x1-x32) that transfer ...

Since the mainboard used also offered PCIe, the same card was run in a PCIe x4 slot, as well as in an x1 configuration, both with noticeably higher performance and putting the ‘why’ in ‘try’.