PC-Hardware: Slots and Cards

• ISA (Industry Standard Adapter) Slots: Socket (slots) for plugging in modem cards, sound cards, old graphic cards, etc. Plug 'n Play (PnP) "control": Cards signal CPU that they want to send or receive through Interrupts (IRQs). Additionally some cards use Direct Memory Access DMA. IRQs and DAM Channels may conflict.
  
  
• PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) Slots. Like ISA but new standard: high-performance, automatically configured by the CPU.
  
  
• AGP (Accelerated Graphics Processors) Slots: New standard for graphic cards.