Its starting to sound like the fx5200 might be the best card to power my HDTV from knoppmyth. I've been searching the web for one and found them everywhere. And the seem to have different specs. It appears nvidia doesn't actually make cards, but many other vendors make them. My quandry is which vendor's card works best?
Is there a newer version of this card that would work better?
Thanks,
Bill

Search the Tier 1 and Tier 2 Harware Recommendation topics for systems that mention HDTV and FX5200. Also search for FX5200 in the DTV topic. You should find lots of posts from folks with working systems and even find some sample HDTV modelines. You'll definitely want a card with a DVI connector and piossibly even support for component out.

And yes, Nvidia makes chips not cards. ATI is the same, and the cards that they market themselves are made by other vendors (EGA is one if memory serves). Both produce one or more reference designs and provide them to partners who build the boards using their chips. A very few of the makers produce their own card designs. You can see this easily if you go to a shopping site like NewEgg which has pictures of boards from different vendors. Pick any GPU and look at a bunch of boards, Ignore the HSF and the PCB color and look at the layout, especially on the backs of the cards. You'll very quickly note that a lot of them are very, very similar, basically because they're using the same reference design lithomasks for the PC boards.

Say for example:
http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/ ... 010-04.jpg
http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/ ... 004-02.JPG
http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/ ... 023-12.JPG
http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/ ... 027-16.jpg