Please help. upgrading dillema

[pitch007]

I have an iwill kk266MB with an athlon T-bird 900, 256 megs PC133, about 60 GB HD and a Voodoo3 3500 OEM card. I am interested in doing some video editing and creation so I need to upgrade. My problem is that I am not sure what the best way to spend my money is. I know I need a new video card because mine only has tv out and has no on board dvd decoder. My MB has the latest bios upgrade (10/22) and will accept athlon xp chips. I am looking at getting a 1700 at newegg for around $114. My question is will it be worth the $$ to get a new MB that supports DDR and then spend even more to get some ddr which I would want around 512MB, or would it be better to upgrade my processor and get 512 or 1GB more Ram for my current rig? Plus I haven't shopped for MB in a while so even if I get a new one I wouldn't know the best deal for the $$. Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[MCS]

A CPU upgrade and a bump to 512MB will give you much more benefit than just going to DDR. The Athlon XP will see a nice increase when using DDR though. I definitely think you would want a new video card though.

 

[Dreadogg]

<< I know I need a new video card because mine only has tv out and has no on board dvd decoder >>

Im confused I am not big on the video end of hardware, and would like to know what video cards do support dvd decoding without software based applications?

 

[MCS]

When you playback a DVD you can either do the decoding purely in software (slow CPUs look out) or you can do it in hardware if your graphics chip supports DVD decoding. Obviously you still need a software DVD player, such as PowerDVD or WinDVD. Does that help clear that up Dreadogg?