AUDIO PC: Direct power to motherboad 24 and 4pin (picoless)

[nige2000]

h97 d3h confirmed working looking hopeful clocks wise too

[tony]

Nigel popped around today and although I was meant to be at least assisting a bout of food poisoning made me an in and out spectator.
Thankfully once in front of a pc mobo Nigel ignores any distractions and keeps plugging at the job.
I had his msi board sitting here for months and he kindly installed it today. Of course with any of this work it never goes easy and really is not for beginners or people like me who know a little but really haven't a clue what is going on.

Happily listening to music tonight on a pc that seems fingers crossed to have settled down. For some reason suspected by Nigel and Pearse(his proper assistant) who called also noise on the grounds was suspected or possibly more batteries to smooth out the power delivery.

Word of caution to anybody attempting this there is no logic. The system was unstable most of the day. Powering up ok but acting up after a track. Settled down then but when we moved it back on the rack with the lid on no power. Back out messing around switching on/off,resetting bios etc and back up again. Carefully put back in the rack and same issues reoccurred. Nigel had to escape at that point and I was only fit to be stretchered to bed. Left the pc on and when I eventually managed to get back up it had powered off again.
A bit of scientific switching on and off and lifting the lid(I did adjust the dodgy grounds switch that have wires close to the case body)and
pc came back up. Playing stably now for over 2hrs so looking hopeful! The lid is back on so hopefully it will all settle down.

This great for me I have a mobo now with battery power and 2 clocks and v2 ppa usb card. Quads are still on the high stands and everything sounds very nice.

If I was asked to explain what do I think all this brings the only answers I can think of are really low noise floor,smooth delivery of everything but nice depth of detail. Many thanks again Nigel for the long hours put in today and to Pearse for helping out while letting us know of his latest barbequing!

[nige2000]

someday there will be a thread mobo clocks entitled "dazed and confused" or "hairloss"

we had the ambulance on speed dial most of the day

at one stage we thought we fried tonys music hard drive
lucky he was too sick to notice

[sima66]

someday there will be a thread mobo clocks entitled "dazed and confused" or "hairloss"

we had the ambulance on speed dial most of the day

at one stage we thought we fried tonys music hard drive
lucky he was too sick to notice

Looks like part two from the previous Canadian version! :)))

[nige2000]

someday there will be a thread mobo clocks entitled "dazed and confused" or "hairloss"

we had the ambulance on speed dial most of the day

at one stage we thought we fried tonys music hard drive
lucky he was too sick to notice

Looks like part two from the previous Canadian version! :)))

yea probably 2tb of david byrne
we might have done the world a favour if we had
he he :)

hmmn gnd

the external hdd was powered via a lovely smps
there was some dubious noise out of the speakers when the power connected to the external drive

most monitors will connect pc gnd to mains earth, this could happen also in dac and/or amps in relation to gnd/earth
hmmn ground loops a plenty
tonys pc would be floating until connected to monitor dac amp etc

anyway worth keeping in mind

anyway more research will be needed on clk gnds to improve stability
still pretty sensitive to "external" factors

seems pretty complicated :(

pity it sounds so damn good

[sima66]

Looks like no light on the end the tunnel for my MoBo! :(

[nige2000]

Never say never
I've not give up
the gigabyte has the odd glitch too
need to get to the bottom of it

[Sligolad]

Here's a post that has caused me to re-evaluate the Mobo options again for an audio PC....

While waiting on my latest batch of Gigabyte boards after a little hiccup last week on one of those last minute tweaks that went wrong I finally took out a Mobo I had stashed with all my other Mobo's, most of which are blown and I should really throw them all out one of these days!

The Mobo I had sitting around for about 2 years was an Asus P9D-M Server board which was the most expensive board I think I ever bought.
When I bought it at the time I was thinking about going for a dual PC setup again with JPlay and it needed another Haswell CPU and non-buffered ECC memory so it sat there all this time in its box until recently I needed something to fool around with while I waited on delivery of the Gigabyte boards.

I set it up on Sunday and luckily I had a pair of RAM 8 + 8 which worked with it as it is particular on RAM, you get 4 beeps if it does not like the RAM and will not even go to Bios.
Because of the layout it does not lend itself to the heatpipe install used on the Streacom case so I stuck an Intel stock unit with fan on the CPU.
I may yet do some engineering to get around this which should not be too hard!

The bios does not allow any down clocking on memory or cpu so I just disabled everything and set memory at 1333 which was the lowest option available. I stuck the Teradak Linear on everything with no Paul Hynes connected to anything. All I really added to it was a JCat USB card.

Started it up on my SSD with RamDisk and all booted OK and ran JPlay Beta1 after setting my system clock back to February.

This is where I was stunned a bit as it sounded great with an Intel fan running (pretty slow on auto) no clock modification, no linear supply to memory, no Paul Hynes to anything so I was pretty shocked to say the least.

The Mobo has 6 clocks on it so I would not know where to start to add a OCXO and same with the memory as there appears to be two channels for power, and search as much as I could I could not find anyway to get at CPU or memory timings but I expect the CPU is running low with little pulling on it as the fan is running real slow and I cannot hear it unless I get very close.

Today I stuck the Paul Hynes 12v on the Mobo Power, and the SSD's (one new PPA SSD with TCXO) on the Paul Hynes 5v lines, and added a PPA V4 USB card today. Bottom line it sounds amazing and it may be coming with me to Scalford ahead of a tricked out Gigabyte board.

I have recently added EML 45 Anniversary Power Tubes to the Lampizator so maybe they are confusing matters but I think these server boards may have something going for them.
Would be interested to hear if anyone else has tried any of these server boards, they are expensive but they do seem to work great right out of the gate with no modifications?

Worth considering if anyone wants a board with no tweaking that sounds great out of the box.
Cheers, Pearse.

[tony]

What board have you got Adam? Nigel set up my(his) two clock msi mobo. Have had problems with maybe grounds causing graphics display to go gaga. This requires reboot as system has hung. Turning on the Jadis also causes this. I think it is the build.
Your set up with all the wooden bits and nice isolation I think might possibly clear it up.
My set up is probably an accident waiting to happen.

Night before last forgot to throw the ground switch and lifepo4's especially 5v depleted.
Took a day of careful charging with motorcycle charger to get the system back up but now have to set the bios up again.

Point is don't give up. I realize easier for me with the guru within striking distance for consultations etc.

[sima66]

Tony, I have the MSI board.
If the wooden isolation would solve the problem, that that is the list of the problems, cause I will be already working on it! :)

I'm not giving up untill Nigel gives up, or find another board what will work with less troubles!! :))