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Capping a thin client PCI riser (Fujitsu Futro S300)

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First post, by xjas

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So it looks like I have to add some capacitors to the PCI riser in my Fujitsu S300 to get a sound card to work. (Technically it works already - the driver initializes , there's just no output.) I did expect this, but was hoping it wouldn't be needed.

Problem is, I have no idea what values these caps should have & I'm not sure how to determine it. I haven't been able to find a picture of the riser with the caps populated - AFAIK it was never sold this way. (Makes me wonder why they bothered including the riser at all??)

Here's the riser in question:

riser.jpg
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Incidentally the part # on it is 736TR3230K100 Rev. 1.0, if it helps (it probably doesn't.) There are four through-hole caps and four SMD ones.

Question: do those surface mount caps absolutely need to be there? If they're all just bus filters, could it work "well enough" without them? I really suck at soldering those. 🙁

twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

Reply 1 of 2, by aaronkatrini

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I had the S400 and it was an ok machine, but not enough for my needs and decided to sell it. I regret it a little though... It was very stable.
Anyway, back to your question.
Can you check the Sound Card in another system to make sure it works? Have you checked in the Bios if the Pci bus is set as master? I don't remember if my s400 had this option, but it might and it could fix it.
Also, you may need to disable the on-board audio first. Also, in the Control Panel, have you set the external sound card as the Default one?

Reply 2 of 2, by xjas

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I've tried a few different known-good sound cards - Ensoniq AudioPCI/Creative SB128 (CT4810) and C-Media 8738-based. The only options for the PCI slot in the BIOS are IRQ and latency (20-255 (ms?)), both of which I've left set to 'auto'. There's no way to disable the onboard VIA AC'97 audio that I can find.

The Ensoniq/Creative cards (I tried a couple of them) are actually initialized successfully on IRQ10 and the driver even loads the wavetable ROM set, but so sound output can be heard. Some/most games seem to detect the sound card, but a few of them give me odd issues - Prince of Persia for example softlocks when it tries to play the musical cue on starting a new game. I think it's waiting for a response from the FM chip that it never gets. (It runs fine in PC Speaker mode.)

The C-Media drivers don't see that card at all (and I know it's good, I've used it in other machines) and fail to initalize.

twitch.tv/oldskooljay - playing the obscure, forgotten & weird - most Tuesdays & Thursdays @ 6:30 PM PDT. Bonus streams elsewhen!

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