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 ...

PCI Express (PCIe) has been around since 2003 ... where you can fit for example an x16 card into an x1 slot if so inclined. Other connectors can be ‘modded’ to allow such larger cards to ...

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’.