Tír Na HiFi

Thought we had a thread for providing dedicated DC supply to Memory but I cannot see one so here goes.
After following Nige's work & recommendations and some other online articles I went at my spare Gigabyte H97M-D3H this evening and it worked out well.

Removing the choke which passes on the voltage to the memory modules was the most awkward part of the job.
It took a fair bit of heat from the soldering iron and plenty of force with a narrow nosed pliers on the choke to get it off the board.

There are 2 chokes between the 24 pin ATX and the memory slots and the one towards the centre of the board is the one to remove, when the board is powered up you will find about 1.5v on each pin of this choke.
The other choke you will find has 5v on it so no need to go near this one.

Once I got the choke off the board I just soldered a wire to the inner connection closest to the memory slots and stuck an Audiowind A-210 regulator recommended by Nige on it.
I have 5v coming off a Molex connection from a recently purchased Teradak Linear Supply going into the DC input (there is also an AC input) on the regulator and I dialled it down to 1.5 volts on the output before connecting it to the memory line.
I took the ground connection for the 1.5v off a ground connection on the Teradak supply.

The system booted up first time and worked well, I dialled down the memory voltage to 1.3v while the PC was running and it was still stable, memory is set at 800Mhz and timings at 5,5,5,16.
I am pretty certain I heard a nice improvement in music playback after the mod but I need more listening time.
The regulator gets hot but you can still put your hand on it after an hour so it should be OK.

I will post some pictures tomorrow which will make it all much clearer than my explaining here.
I hope to now do this on my main audio PC next week to see how it improves audio playback.

Cheers, Pearse.

excellent stuff

think the clean power to memory thing is lost in the abyss of the build a audio pc thread

them chokes are a bugger to get off

would be less heat if you could tap into a 3.3v rail each ram stick could pull up to 7 watt
experiment with the voltage there will be an optimum

does that gigabyte mobo work with non atx compliant power ie just hooking up 12,5 and 3.3v?

it looks like a nice board i see the h97 variety aint the dearest

Square area with 2 holes is where the Choke was removed from the board.
In a following picture I have it sitting precariously on the supply wire just so you can see it off the board.

I am running up the hill expecting to get to the top sometime soon but with Nigel and Pearse I realize now this trip is going all the way to Everest.

Thanks for the excellent right-up and photos, Pearse (and Nige) - that looks highly inflictable at my H61M mobo.

nige2000 wrote:think the clean power to memory thing is lost in the abyss of the build a audio pc thread

would be less heat if you could tap into a 3.3v rail each ram stick could pull up to 7 watt
experiment with the voltage there will be an optimum

I remember your write up some time ago Nige and it is most likely buried in the audio PC thread alright, too difficult to find anything in there now so at least we can post our experiences here.

I went with the 5v supply as I have plenty of them available and with plenty of amps on tap.
I had 2 x 8Gb Ram sticks powered of the single Audiowind Reg and I was worried that it may struggle so I had another one ready to to stick in in parallel if needed but it seemed fine powering the 2 memory sticks.
The heat off it is not a worry for me given I am now running 28 valves (tubes) everytime I power up my audio system, will have to look for a good solid state amp for the summers :-)

Must do some research to find out if the Regulator gives better performance with a large voltage delta (5v in & 1.3v out) and accompanying high heat and energy waste or if you get comparable performance with a small voltage delta (3.3v in & 1.3v out).

Anyone any ideas?
Cheers, Pearse.

Are the gigabyte boards working with non atx compliant power supplies ie just 3.3 5 and 12v?
The gap in the voltage of input and output has to be dissipated in heat 3.3v is more than enough voltage and will have more current available at it is more efficient at smaller gaps in voltage

I'd like to experiment with batteries cells either pre or post the Chinese reg
I'd imagine two lifepo4 in parallel pre would work or a large bank of nimh in parallel post reg

Hi Nige, the Gigabyte boards have been my favourite so far as they work well with just 3.3, 5, 12v without ATX sensing and all that stuff.
Even when you get the odd failure on start when you have gone too far on the Bios settings it still keeps all the settings with the Dual Bios design.
Very stable and easy to navigate through the Bios settings, it also has that not very obvious method of entering the memory timings like the MSI board where you click on Auto and then type in the values!!

At some point during the year I will purchase some of those cheap lifepo4's and wire them in to see how they work.
Cheers, Pearse.

Link to Audiowind Regulator here http://www.audiowind.com/pdf/A-210.pdf

I should be able to remove the current heatsink and cut away the back part of the PCB and then fix the Regulator IC to the inside of the Streacom FC5WS Case on the left side where there is no heatsink duties taking place.