I accidentaly with the power on tried to connect the External firewire
bracket pins to the Internal audio header.
Sparks flew and the onboard sound is gone.
I put a Turtle beach $50 card in with spdif in/out and all works perfectly.
Should ALL be okay, how can I be 100% sure if something else might be wrong?
Do be on the safe side should I RMA it?
In which case you are asking the retailer/manufacturer to swallow your
mistake. There is a moral issue in here somewhere....your decision, of
course.
I have assembled many computers. I have learned through an accident
or two - smoking peripherals, never motherboard.. touch wood....
the following:-
(a) For a new-to-you motherboard, always, always read the installation
part of the motherboard manual very carefully before picking up
a screwdriver.
(b) When working on ANY hardware inside a computer ALWAYS
disconnect the <<power-cord>> before starting. The consequences
of ignoring this admonition can be VERY expensive.
(c) Consult all documentation to make sure that all peripheral and
power-interface connections are totally compatible, and in the case of
the hard-disk and floppy-disk interfaces, correctly oriented at both
ends; some HD interconnecting cables miss the index lug - you have to
use the cable-marking to ID pin1. In the case of a floppy, be
absolutely certain the pin 1 ID at the floppy itself is correctly
identified; the plug orientation is not standard and can be 180
degrees end-to-end rotated. The 10-pin MB connections for auxiliary
USB and Firewire are NOT interchangeable ( board damage), even though
they have the same index and pin-count - gross stupidity.. Intel
defined the USB board connect, dunno who did the Firewire, but
obviously they did not communicate !!
( BTW, in my case I regretfully swallowed the smoked peripherals.....)
If the catalina board works flawlessly should I just keep it?
How does the Turtle beach compare to the realtek HD chip?
I have no idea about Realtek HD, but going by their previous efforts
you probably are not missing much. Their integrated solutions (cheap)
consume quite a few CPU cycles. For best performance/lowest analog
noise you need a discrete audio peripheral anyway.
John Lewis
- Technology early-birds are flying guinea-pigs.
