Yes it does Mutly. I noticed that reference also. However I think I may have sourced the missing part - with luck. Many thanks for your assistance - I appreciate it.
I have tried to use a coax spdif out from a motherboard before, sadly, the computer companies seem to think that taking a 5v ttl signal and sticking it on an RCA plug is all they need to do.
Proper coaxial spdif is isolated and a lower voltage. If you use coax, you may end up with a groundloop which will make the digital dropout whenever there is noise on the power feeding the gear. motherboard outputs are probarbly the only time that you want to choose an optical connection over coax, and cables are cheap enough these days too.
mruane: Yes it does Mutly. I noticed that reference also. However I think I may have sourced the missing part - with luck. Many thanks for your assistance - I appreciate it.
Cheers Mike
Hey Mike,
Did you get this sorted? I'm looking at buying a gigabyte board myself and it would be good to be able to use this feature.
i have a gigabyte mobo (939) which has onboard spdif in/off (analog) along with the normal 8 way sound card onboard - which works very well with movies/htpc setup. The biggest concern i had/have is that the onboard sound is very cpu intensive compared to an addon sound card such as creativelabs which is what i've added for game support. Additionally the northbridge chip on the mobo has an onboard fan which is excessively noisy. (couldn't install a heatsink as it won't fit under the 8800 graphics card extenting that far). - more so than the other 6 fans already in the PC including the graphics card. My mobo is a couple of years old now so don't know if its still an issue with noise and the sound card resource drain was a known issue with the onboard sound at the time so may also be irralevant now - just something to bear in mind (or not :) )
Yes I did get it resolved - by buying a SPDIF connector from a colleague at work. I have not installed it yet but will soon. Someone earlier in this thread posted a link to a NZ provider that retails them for about $15 so its not a big purchase.
PS I bought the Gigabyte GA945GCMX-S2 motherboard and loaded it into an Antec Fusion case. I have not purchased a video card yet but I probably will because the onboard video just cannot drive the 42" plasma at anything other than 1024 x 768, which is just not enough. Still, using Media Portal or GBPVR the playback is perfectly adequate and its coping with the onboard sound just fine. The whole kit is whisper quiet. You have to get right up close to hear either the case or the motherboard at all. The only way I know its switched on - is the power light! It was a breeze to assemble and configure.
mruane: I have not purchased a video card yet but I probably will because the onboard video just cannot drive the 42" plasma at anything other than 1024 x 768, which is just not enough.
Most 42" Plasma's only have a native reolution of 1024x768, what else were you going to try and use?
Ummm, I was certain I was able to drive the 42" plasma at 1280 width from the notebook in the past. Perhaps its time for some further research. Thanks for the feedback.
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