Top i/o panel and my sound cards

[mcanas]

Hey guys,

I have a Coolermast CM 690 case and a couple of a sound cards.

The one I'm using now is a PCI Express card that came with my Crosshair motherboard. The top i/o panel has a couple of ways to audio connectors two of which can connect to the PCI Express sound card. The card works fine, except that the drivers are SoundMax which seem to work poorly with my 5.1 speakers.

I also have an older Sound Blaster Audigy2 PCI sound card which I bought along with the speakers for my previous rig. However, the CM 690 top panel connectors don't seem to be compatible. There is an AC'97 connector and an HD Audio connector, but the pin configuration for either doesn't look compatible with any connector on the sound card.

There are also a bunch of loose pins, which I wonder if they could be used to connect to the Sound Blaster card.

Does anybody know how I might be able to connect the CM 690 top panel audio connectors to a Sound Blaster PCI card?

 

[whallenich]

Hi,
I had the same problem with my XFi Fata1ity card - in the end I bought a capable adapter from performance-pcs.com which worked like a charm.

Also have a look at http://audigy2zshowto.blogspot.com/

Hope that helps.

 

[asgallant]

You can make the connector cable (or buy one like whallenich did), but don't expect it to work perfectly. It's pretty easy to get the audio out functioning, but the mic input is screwy and the cable detector works backwards (instead of muting the rear outputs when you plug headphones into the front, it mutes the rear outputs when you unplug your headphones). Creative made the connector work strangely on purpose, so you would have to buy their drive bay add-on to get front panel access to audio.

I got around the problem by buying USB headphones. If you plug them in and set them as your default audio device, then when they are plugged in, you get sound from them, and when you unplug them, your sound card takes over.

 

[cornholio_oh]

I got the X-Fi / Audigy cable adapter from Performance PC's and it works great (both audio and mic). Just a note though, I had to swap the 2 black wires (Mic Input and Ground) on the adapter cable. They inserted the terminal pins at the wrong locations. I had to carefully extract the 2 pins out of the AC'97 / HD connector and flip-flop their places. Also, it did not work very well when connecting it to the computer case's AC'97 connector (only 1 side of the audio worked). But when I plugged it into the HD connector, it worked perfectly fine. The mic volume was really low and I couldn't hear myself when speaking. I had to go into the X-fi console launcher and max out the mic setting. I also had to go into Windows Audio and Speaker settings and max it out in there also. There is also an Advanced tab that needs to be selected and under that is a Microphone boost checkbox that needs to be applied (1 Mic +20dB boost).

The front audio panel jacks work great. When I plug my headset in (audio and mic), the rear speakers mute as they should.