Recommend Mainboard / TVcard please

[jcee]

I ran MP on a board with VIA chipset and with an FX5200 (passive cooled)

I have often freezes. It seems Directx is freezing as when I kill the MP task I can VNC to the HTPC and watch the Desktop.. But the TV still shows the frozen picture until a reset.

I guess there is something of a hardware issue board/gfx. I reinstalled lots of times, checked out different drivers.. nothing really helped.. So I guess the easiest ist just to buy new hardware..

I have an Athlon 3000+. Which rock-stable mainboard/gfx combo would you recommend?!

Also there should not be any standby/hibernation problems.

A friend of mine told me he has problems that encrypted channels do not work after going to standby and comming back.. (though he is using TVcentral) I guess this is also a hardware issue..

What would you recommend.
(Living in germany, going to buy from reichelt.de or mindfactory.de)

[Bram]

The freezing could very well be caused by your videocard. I had the same card and the same problems. Passively cooled and got way to hot which resulted in freeses. That card sucks anyway.
If you want a affordable AGP card... buy a ASUS N6200 256MB. I bought one in a regualr computer store for 60 euro.

[jcee]

Yeah, thought about it..

But: My boss and I do have the same gfx card but from different vendors.. but same chipset and both passive, but we different mainboards..

Both cards freeze on his mainboard, no matter if it is installed on my or his computer case..

On my board both cards run fine...

We picked that card because it was one affordable hardware DirectX 9.1c card. So to get less stress on the CPU..

What would be a good selection know when going to pick a different card. It should be passive cooled to get a silent HTPC