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htpc help

B

brysig228

Gawd
Joined
Feb 27, 2007
Messages
573
i finally build my htpc but i have no idea how to connect the spdif to my video card to get audio through the hmdi. the card is ati hd 3450 and the manual is POS and no help at all. what kind of cable/wire to connect the spdif from my mobo to the video card and how do i connect it?

thanks
 
I believe that you don't actually need a cable inside the case--the driver sends the audio data over the PCIe bus directly to the card.
 
Does the rear panel on the Motherboard have a coaxial SPDIF OUT port on it?

Does the Video card have a 2 pin SPDIF IN plug?

If so then look on www.htomega.com for a cord that might work for you. Or use the picture of their CA-1 cable to build your own.
 
Mohonri said:
I believe that you don't actually need a cable inside the case--the driver sends the audio data over the PCIe bus directly to the card.
Click to expand...

If only it were so easy. Video cards do not perform any audio processing, at least not any that I know of that are available right now. Any HDMI equipped video card needs the audio signal sent to it from the sound card. If you are using a DVI to HDMI dongle to convert to an HDMI signal then your chances of being able to get audio out of the video card are pretty much non-existant. I don't know of any DVI only video cards that have an SPDIF IN terminal to bring sound signals onto the card.

Until the PC video industry and the PC audio industry start working together we aren't going to have an all-in-one solution for this. Auzentech is in the processof putting out an X-Tender card for the Prelude X-Fi sometime this year that will have an HDMI IN and an HDMI OUT port. Basically you will run a short HDMI cable from your vid card to the X-Tender. Th X-Dender will merge audio from the Prelude with the video signal and send it out via the HDMI OUT port. There is still a lot of uncertainty as to whether this will finally be a solution to get HD Audio from a PC, but we can be hopeful.
 
The Radeon HD 3x00 series cards can send audio over HDMI. They have an audio codec onboard. You do not need to connect your motherboard's onboard audio to the video card. As far as I know you do not even need another sound device in your system.

When you install the drivers for the card it should install a sound device on your system as well as the video. Set this as your output and use the included DVI->HDMI adapter (ATI has those ports set to pass audio if their adapter is used and the onboard codec is enabled) and you should be good to go.

See this page, under HDMI:

http://ati.amd.com/products/radeonhd3400/specs.html

"Integrated HD audio controller with multi-channel (5.1) AC3 support, enabling a plug-and-play cable-less audio solution"

Note that this means it does not support the new standards like Dolby TrueHD or DTS Master Audio, but it will still send 5.1 audio.
 
I stand corrected. Thank you. Interesting that in all my searching and reading on this matter, I never found this info.
 
Tell me about it. You'd think a feature like that is something sites would be testing, but it seems to have slipped by the wayside. I think the most I saw in articles about the 3x00 series was a brief mention before numbers were run. For example, the line in the tech report article about the 3850 and 3870 reads:

To help make that possible, the RV670 includes support for HDCP over dual-link DVI connections and, like the R600, has a built-in digital audio controller it can use to pass sound over an HDMI connection. AMD offers a DVI-to-HDMI converter, as well.

And it's just in the middle of the second page amongst a lot of other things. I didn't see it mentioned anywhere in the [H] article. Their one about the 3400 and 3600 (that's just filled with slides from a presentation) has a slide about it but nothing pointing it out. Anandtech's 3400/3600 preview doesn't mention it and their 3800 article just has a slide pointing it out.

You'd think a feature important to a market in which these cards might be used would be given a little more space in a review. It's like trying to find the dimensions of a video card before you buy one that might be too big for a case.
 
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