Switching to something like a 1920x1200 panel and then using small amounts of AA such as 4xAA will make everything look nicer. than 24xAA at 1024
This is true. At 1920x1200, I don't even use AA. Truthfully, I never really cared for it, though I've never owned a truly high-end video card that was capable of the highest resolutions, and still had horsepower left for AA settings. Although my SLI GTX460 cards might, I haven't really experimented with them.
I guess this is another way of saying, I prefer raw framerate to AA.
Edit: I think I see everyone basically suggesting the same thing, and then the OP gets argumentative and thumbing his nose up at everyone else's (IMHO, reasonable) suggestions.
He should seriously spend that money on a better monitor first. A nice 24" 1080p monitor would look WAY better than his 24x AA.
AA has somewhat diminishing returns, if you have a bunch of money to drop on hardware to improve image quality it's a better idea to get a better monitor which runs a higher resolution and increase the base level image quality rather than focus on the diminishing returns of high levels of AA.
Switching to something like a 1920x1200 panel and then using small amounts of AA such as 4xAA will make everything look nicer. than 24xAA at 1024
Getting a better monitor FIRST, and THEN upgrading the video card to one that affords a REASONABLE amount of AA at that res, would seem to be the most prudent course, especially for budget.
However, I can think of one particular reason why an "old geezer" (is that really you, Barfo?) wouldn't want a newer, larger, higher-res monitor, and that is because it would make the text too hard to read with their eyesight, for non-gaming tasks.
So, possibly, one way of optimizing both text size, and gaming graphics quality, would be utilizing a high level of AA, on a lower resolution.
So if you want to game on a 7970 on a 1024 screen, hey, be my guest, it's a free country. But I probably wouldn't choose to do that myself.