Need upgrade advice

[worknman]

I will be upgrading soon to an AMD T-bird 1.2ghz 266 FSB. My current PC has a Diamond Viper 770 TNT2. I read in a previous post where people recommended to someone else that he should get the fastest GeForce card he could afford instead of the 770. As for me, I don't play any 3D games at all. Would I see that much of a performance increase in 2D by upgrading to a GeForce2 MX or an ATI Radeon 32MB DDR (the fastest cards I have a budget for)?

Also, I will be getting the new PC from a wholesale company through a friend. The following motherboards are the ones I have to choose from. Which would pick? I plan to use this thing mainly for programming (C++/Java) and playing old 2D arcade and console games via emulation:

* ASUS A7A266 SOC-A, 266MHZ FSB, ALI CH, DDR, ATA100
* ASUS A7V133 SOCKET A MAINBOARD SUPPORTS 266MHZ CPU

Well, there are other boards to choose from, but they're either out of my price range (boards with audio), non-266 FSB or really cheap Gigabye boards.

Anyway, that is all ... thanks for reading http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

[Zimfun]

Can't really say much re. the graphics card question . I have personally always gone for the best graphics card I can afford , but then I play a lot of games . I suppose it's up to you , if 3D graphics aren't that important then stick to your existing GPU .A better graphics card , say a Geforce2 MX will give you improved 2D performance , i'm not sure that it would be too noticable though .

Both motherboards you mention are good , the main difference being that on the A7A you can use either SDRAM or the faster DDRAM .
The latter has really dropped in price over the last couple of months , it's now more or less the same price as SDRAM .

See here for a review of the A7A http://www.dansdata.com/a7a266.htm

and here for a review of the A7V http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1417&p=1

I chose to use the A7A in the last machine I built ( to use the DDR memory option) and have been fairly happy with it .