HP m8200n SPDIF problem

CougTek

Hairy Aussie
Joined
Jan 21, 2002
Messages
8,729
Location
Québec, Québec
One of my customers has an HP Media center PC m8200n, which uses this motherboard. Notice the 3 pins white SPDIF connector in the very bottom of the board, about in the middle of the last PCI slot.

The guy wanted an HDMI output, so I installed him a MSI N9400GT-MD512H graphic card. And I planned to connect the coax audio output from the motherboard to an audio amplifier so he could listen to movies playing on his PC on his home theater kit. But I have no sound (I selected the digital output as primary audio output in Vista's audio control panel). The amplifier receives no signal from the computer.

Reading on the Net, it seems I need to connect the two pins SPDIF audio connector from the MSI GeFarce card in order to get sound. It's absolutely ridiculous, but there it goes. Unfortunately, the connector going to the motherboard on the MSI card is like the connectors made for, let's say, a typical front panel connector to the motherboard. It doesn't fit in the 3-pins SPDIF connector of the POS ECS motherboard HP used for that shitty box.

I haven't found a two-to-three pins SPDIF connector on the Net.

I'm scratching my head about this one.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
Joined
Jan 17, 2002
Messages
22,324
Location
I am omnipresent
First thing is: HP has switched from using Asus boards to using ECS? Ouch.

You want the video card to be the full-time sound output?
I don't think that setup will work with the nVidia card. My understanding is that nVidia does not fully support sound output via HDMI, at least with its older cards.

Also, Vista is incredibly obnoxious about digital sound output in systems with HDMI generally. Sometimes it will just switch the sound output without any control on your part. You'll just open up Media Player or something and Vista will decide to switch from your onboard sound or sound card to the Digital out on your graphics card.

My general advice would be to stick to that SP/DIF output full time. That's more or less how my HTPC is set up now, since my receiver doesn't do HDMI to begin with. This is actually a lot easier to accomplish with an nVidia card since as far as I've been able to tell nVidia hardware won't do full sound over HDMI right anyway.
 
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