The "most advanaced" graphics bus used these days is PCI-E (PCI Express) but beware you may actually need to go into the BIOS to set it up (may default as PCI). As far as that goes, watch the power requirement of your intended card. Most cheap systems use relatively-low power (<300W) PSs while some of the graphics cards suggest using much higher ones.

It seems most newer MBs these days use SATA (serial ATA) instead of PATA (paralle ATA/IDE/EIDE) for storage. Some of course support both. SATA is so much easier to set up (no ribbon cable but the power adapters and SATA cables can be atrociously expensive by comparison).