[NTLUG:Discuss] any experience with an Intel D845BG motherboard with built in sound?

[Fred James]

I have been playing with various configurations on this motherboard for 
about a week now, and here is what I have found/done (YMMV).

(1) I have disabled that onboard sound (AC'97) in favor of a 
SoundBlaster 16 PCI card.
(2) I have opted for an ATI XPERT 128 PCI video card instead of an ATI 
Radeon 7500 (AGP) video card.

Main reason for (1) and (2):  I promised to hand this machine over to my 
wife sometime, in working order and to her satisfaction (end of next 
week is my deadline), so I cannot make it my life's work.  I am pretty 
sure the SB 16 and XPERT cards will do a good job for her.

The configurations I am interested in revolve around Red Hat Linux 7.1, 
VMWare Workstation 3.0, Microsoft Windows 98, and/or Microsoft Windows 2000.
(1) I have been testing with Linux as a Host OS, and Windows as a quest 
OS in VMWare.
     (a) I can live with the reduction in sound quality.
     (b) Video and mouse are pretty good, especially after adding the 
VMWare tools.
     (c) CD-ROM is OK once you learn, if Linux auto mounts the CD when 
inserted, you have to remember to unmount it in Linux
     (d) The main problem for us is in passing really good printer 
support through VMWare.

(2) The next series of test will be as dual boot, and to that I shall 
add VMWare in the Linux OS, to use the actual Windows install as the 
guest OS.
     (a) I am sure the dual boot will work fine
     (b) I want to know if this will give any better results with the 
guest OS.

I have dropped the Windows 2000 from the mix because I don't need it to 
run any of my wife's legacy programs (from Windows 95), and 98 will give 
us the USB support she wanted.  I am hoping to avoid having to upgrade 
too much Windows based software.

I am keeping all the suggestions offered, even those I don't try, 
because I am sure I shall come down this road again.  All I have to do 
is try not to lose them.  Also, I sent an email to the author of the 
Sound HowTo about the onboard sound issue, since I couldn't find 
anything in the HowTo that spoke about it, and I hadn't had the 
suggestion offered by Kevin (below) at that time.

Thanks to everyone, and I'll keep you posted.


kbrannen at gte.net wrote:

> I have an SBLive! card; it also uses the ac97 module.  I had real 
> trouble with it until I wrote my own rc script to do:
>         insmod soundcore
>         insmod sound
>         insmod ac97_codec
>         insmod emu10k1 || return=$rc_failed
> You can replace the emu10k1 module with the one you need, but until I 
> did this, nothing seemed to work.
> 
> HTH,
> Kevin
> 
> 
> Fred James wrote:
> 
>> Additional info (from further testing):
>> (1) I discovered that the set of speakers I have won't work if both 
>> speakers are not connected (left speaker to sound card, and right 
>> speaker to left speaker)
>> (2) Still, the on board sound card doesn't give sound.
>> (3) I installed a SoundBlaster 16 PCI card, and it seems to work.
>>
>> Does anyone have any thoughts or experience with this kind of thing?
>>
>> I was working for the Sound HowTo from the beginning, and it says if 
>> your distro has sound configuration built in, try that first.  That's 
>> when I found out that Red Hat 7.1 (sndconfig) knows about both the 
>> Intel on board card, and of course SoundBlaster.
>>
>>
>> Fred James wrote:
>>
>>> Intel D845BG motherboard with an on board sound card (AC'97)
>>> Red Hat 7.1 found it, but I can not get any sound out of it.
>>> Any experience there?
>>>
>>
>>
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> http://www.ntlug.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
> 
> 


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