This paper evaluates the use of FIFOs in the context of Hardware-Software Co-Design. We compare the performance of software only designs to designs augmented with FIFO based hardware accelerators. We analyze two applications: rendering images of the Mandelbrot set and playing the game of Connect Four. In both cases, we show that hardware acceleration using FIFOs is simple to implement and provides a significant performance increase. Both applications have easily identifiable computational "hot-spots" which can be modularized, and accelerated using custom hardware. Each application is designed in C and executed, then the hot-spot is rewritten using VHDL and attached directly to the MicroBlaze using FIFOs. For each application, we selected a FPGA board which is well suited to the tasks required. The Mandelbrot experiment is carried out using a Xilinx Multimedia Board. The Connect Four experiment uses a Digilent Digilab-2E and a DIO1 add-on board.