In March 1997 the hottest PC technologies included 3D accelerators, USB and the new DirectX. The March 1997 issue of boot also had new information on Intel's upcoming Klamath processor (Pentium II).
My second PC was a 300 MHz Pentium II and it was certainly light years faster that my four year old 486 DX2-66 at the time. Mine came with Windows 95 but if you wanted to do something serious like run a server you really needed Windows NT for stability. It wouldn't be until Windows XP came out in late 2001 that you really had the best of both worlds.
There was also an article on OS/2 which was fading away. This is a shame since OS/2 Warp was really superior to Windows 95 at the time.