Don't buy your next PC just yet. Honest.

PC World - If you're thinking about buying or building a new PC soon, you should wait. Seriously, wait another month or so; some very cool new technology is on the way.

That's not the type of advice I typically give. After all, there's always some sweet new technology just around the corner. If you keep waiting for the "next big thing," you'll never get that new PC. But this is different. This time we're talking about some fundamental improvements to the PC platform itself.

Yes, I'm excited about a chip set.

In the next month or so, expect Intel Corp. to launch chip sets with more new technology goodies than any self-respecting geek could hope to find under his Star Trek-ornament-laden Christmas tree. New system bus, new memory, new hard drive technology, new wireless options, new sound -- it really is the works.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. fans, fret not: That chip maker's partners are also planning new chip sets with many (but not all) of these same technologies. Intel loyalists, however, will get first dibs.

Get on the bus

Intel's three new chip sets -- the high-end 925X Express (formerly code-named Alderwood) and the midrange 915G and 915P Express chip sets (formerly Grantsdale) -- will support the PCI Express system bus instead of standard Peripheral Component Interconnect.

Today's venerable PCI standard allows data to travel at up to 133MB/sec. in one direction only; stuff headed the other way has to wait its turn. A standard PCI Express bus (called an X1) will offer transfers of up to 250MB/sec. in each direction, for a total of 500MB/sec. This should help speed up basic PC operations -- and it'll vastly improve gigabit networking, which runs into serious bottlenecks on the PCI bus.

Another area that's always in need of more bandwidth is graphics. Years ago, to support the evolution of powerful graphics cards, the PC industry abandoned the PCI bus and created the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP). PCI Express brings graphics back into the fold and offers 4GB/sec. concurrent transfers to and from PCI Express-based graphics cards. In comparison, today's 8x AGP bus offers 2GB/sec. of shared bandwidth. Intel's 925X Express and 915P Express chip sets will offer a PCI Express graphics port, but no AGP. The 915G Express will include Intel's new integrated Graphics Media Accelerator 900.

While it's unlikely the first generation of PCI Express-based graphics cards will take full advantage of that additional throughput, it should eventually lead to even better, more responsive PC graphics. All that throughput will make