Sound Card Touching PSU

_Genesis_56

Commendable
May 24, 2016
3
0
1,510
Hey guys, sorry if this is the incorrect format, this is my first post ever...but I bought a Creative Sound Blaster Z, but when I put it in the system I found that it was stopping the R9 390 fan from spinning as it was sitting too close to it (see link 1). So I installed a ribbon extender and now have it just sitting on top of the PSU with an optical cable coming through into it (see link 2 and 3). I was just wondering if this poses any immediate problems to the system. Thanks again for any help offered.

http://i.imgur.com/DeNdq2a.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/RbJ3XYE.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/Drxo7R1.jpg
 
Solution
That.. is dangerous and ghetto. Why don't you just mount it on one of the brackets??? It should fit without any issues. If you move the PC, knock it over, it could short.
I don't see any problem, just make sure the metal parts of the soundcard doesn't touch any other metal parts around to avoid short-circuitting anything and also avoid noise from common mode circuits that can happen (sorry for my bad english).
 


It wont fit on the bracket due to the ribbon extender, any suggestions what I could do outside of buying a new motherboard.....now i can get it beside the gpu, and as long I dont screw it into the bracket it wont stop the fan (it will still touch the gpu) from spinning..however I was worried about the weight of the sound card being too much for the connector to handle.
what do you think?
 
Since you're using an optical cable, you're bypassing the expensive DAC circuitry built into the sound card. Are you sure that you are even using any of the features of the sound card at this point? Once you go with digital audio output from a PC, many of the differences between expensive add-in-boards and motherboard integrated sound devices disappear.

About the only reason I can see spending extra on an add-in board sound card is if I was looking for DDL or DTS Live encoding and the motherboard didn't offer either of those solutions.
 


Yeah my motherboard is terrible haha, so i need it for the DDL encoding. Think il just buy a new motherboard, gives me an excuse to get other upgrades needed anyway.

Cheers for the help everyone
 
On another note, since your GPU has AMD's True Audio feature built in, you already have a hardware sound device that can offload features if supported. As of Windows Vista, however, DirectSound can not perform hardware functions with sound cards, whether you're using Creative Labs or any other brand. There are work arounds on a case by case basis, and other audio software API's such as OpenAL, but it's hard to say you're getting much benefit going with an add-in sound card these days, unless your software is specifically written to take advantage of it.

The benefit to the True Audio hardware in your AMD graphics card is, HDMI audio is capable of far higher quality than the compressed multi-channel bitstreams of either optical or digital coax provided by your sound card.