Recommendations on new hardware

[Benjamin Walkenhorst]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hello everybody,

The PC I currently own looks about like this:

Pentium III 450MHz
256MB RAM
Motherboard by Siemens (I think so, though I am not entirely certain), with a 
VIA82C686 chipset and just *3* PCI slots (one of them shared with ISA)
2 hard disks (both by IBM, 80 and 30 Gig), 2 CD-drives (Sony 4x/2x/24x CD-RW, 
LiteOn 12x/40x DVD-ROM)

The main problem with this setup is the motherboard, which sucks quite a lot.
The first problem I have is the limited number of PCI slots available. I own 
an AVM A1 which occupies the ISA slot of the board; the ISA slot is shared 
with one of the PCI slots, which leaves me with just *two* free PCI slots, 
which are occupied by my sound card (Terratec XLerate or something, Aureal 
Vortex 8820 chipset) and my TV card (Hauppauge WinTV Go, Brooktree 878 
chipset). I still do have a Videologic DVD decoder card I would like to use 
and I would also like to have an ethernet card. So I need a board with at 
least two more PCI slots (plus an ISA slot, or I need a new ISDN card).

The second problem: I got a 19" screen recently. So I increased my desktop 
resolution to 1280x1024. Now whatching TV and listening to MP3s at the same 
time makes my machine crash (PCI bus freezes probably).

The third problem is my BIOS: Linux, FreeBSD *and* Windows 2000 don't 
recognize my 80GB-harddisk, they only see the first 32GB.

What this comes down to is: I need a new motherboard. 
And I want to make sure it runs with both Linux and FreeBSD. 
It should be rock-solid-stable primarily and perform well, if possible. Nice 
features are alway welcome but have low priority. I thought of getting a 
board with the nForce2-chipset, but I think these aren't supported by 
FreeBSD, are they?
Anyway, what do you recommend for a new motherboard? It should be able to 
deal with 384 to 512 MB of RAM

(I am using FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE!)

Thanks in advance,

kind regards,

Benjamin

- -- 
"Der Hoffnung beraubt sein,
 heißt noch nicht - verzweifeln."
(Albert Camus)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Public Key available at http://www.krylon.de

iD8DBQE+8tzUoYumWdMvhMQRAiovAJ4laypDDLAL5RkG32AEPdr2TFnWAgCfWqOI
cJm9mWeoAkd/ttRuwyF4yBA=
=eGYi
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----