HP XW8400 Front Panel Sound cable

[Jpg-93]

Hi

I need to connect an sound card (SB Audigy FX 1570) to the front panel with the original HP cable disconnected from the Motherboard because the integrated chip sound don't work more) The sound card have an 2x5 connector (Intel ?) but the Hp cable is 10 pins in line

Have somebody the code color of the sound HP sound cable or the schematics of sound connector of the mother board to avoid to make an mistake.

Many thanks for the help

[DGroves]

are you sure the onboard audio is bad? I've seen many cases where a installed video cards onboard audio circuit makes the HP bios think a external audio card is installed and the HP bios sets it's bios setting to the wrong audio setting

if doing a video card driver install for the very first time (clean windows install)

just uncheck the audio driver during the video card setup to prevent the card's audio from being enabled as the default audio device during the video driver install (this should be mentioned during setup but for some reason is not)

what is/does the cards audio driver doing? well the card has onboard  HDMI digital audio capability which allows the card to combine the video and the audio into one cable, but you need a device at the other end that knows how to use this HDMI combined signal to prevent this Go into sound properties and set the default audio device to the realtek onboard device.

the HP xw8400/6400 motherboards have your missing AC97 audio 2x5 connector header right next to the installed HP10 pin connector but only the board solder locations exist (no actual jack) this follows the industry pinouts, you can use a tone trace function on a multimeter to pinout the matching pins between the two audio locations

for those that want to add the missing jack

you can simply have a repair shop remove the solder from the holes, insert the missing jack and resolder. note that because this is a multi layer board YOU MUST HAVE THE PROPER EQUIPMENT, a 75 watt pencil soldering is not going to work!

additional info from "SDH" attached to this reply

AC97/HD audio pinout(s) link:

https://superuser.com/questions/378082/how-to-connect-my-front-audio-panel

[Jpg-93]

Many thanks for your reply/help

I have an these WS 8400 since a long time (!) and i force win11 pro 64  installation on it last year with no major problem. It works with an Nvidia quatro 600 and some PCIe card (USB2 extensions and now SB Audigy FX) I think that sound chip is dead after having try to make an clean install of Win11, Win10, and Ubuntu (each one after other) on an full formatted disk and for the same result : no sound (no audio output device is installed) It's the reason that i bought the PCIe Sound Blaster card witch deliver an very correct sound. Now i would use the micro an headphones of the front end using the HP cable that i have disconnected from the Main board. For that i would tried to made an adapter or soldering the existing cable to an new audio connector in the correct order. it's only more comfortable to plug/unplug an headphone/micro headset than the back connectors of the sound card.

Sorry for my English and explanations.

Thks a lot

[Jpg-93]

Perhaps i make a mistake i don't test the HDMI connector, i only disconnected the audio front end cable (front audio connector system board component 18 on the technical manual  near the auxiliary audio 17)  for trying to find the correct way to plug to the 2x5 pins of the SB card