According to your motherboard's manual, their arent' any USB or AC97 Audio headers on it. https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-6VXC7 … #support-manual

You can use a USB add-on card that will give you additional ports on the back as well as provide an internal header.

For the audio ports, you'll need a sound card that gives you an internal AC97 header.

Gotcha. By chance, do you know if the AWE64 Gold has such a header? I don’t think so… so I’d have to put another sound card in here, a PCI one.

JustRob wrote on 2021-12-05, 16:24:

Gotcha. By chance, do you know if the AWE64 Gold has such a header? I don’t think so… so I’d have to put another sound card in here, a PCI one.

I'm not aware of a revision of the card that does. But some do have an MB_Pro connector which was designed to be used with a Modem Blaster. These expose speaker and microphone I/O and might work after you adjust some wires in the AC97 connector.

https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/MB_PRO

Thanks, I'll check that out.

Another question: The case came with a nifty multi-card reader with a single USB port built in one of the 3.5" inch drive bays. There's two thick black wires coming out of it, which merge together and then spread in an array of colorful thin wires, which once again ends in a 9-pin connector. Do you happen to know what kind of header I'd need to get that working?

Looks like the sort of header that some motherboard had for 2 USB ports. I'd guess it uses one port for the card read and the other port for the USB socket.

Startech do a 7 port PCI USB card, PCIUSB7, 4 external and 3 internal, that has the right sort of header on it. Never used it, so no idea how well it'd work.

I think I’ll see if I can find one of those then, ty.

Dunno if you know this, but this card reader isn’t one of those things I can use to install Windows on a SD card, right? I think I’d need a IDE or SCSI2SD solution for that.

JustRob wrote on 2021-12-05, 22:48:

I think I’ll see if I can find one of those then, ty.

Dunno if you know this, but this card reader isn’t one of those things I can use to install Windows on a SD card, right? I think I’d need a IDE or SCSI2SD solution for that.

Pretty sure not. I don't think many boards supported booting from USB devices at that time. Others will know for sure about that.

Another question:

Checked out the PCIUSB7 card, but even though in the description it says it has two motherboard headers, I can only seem to spot one on the pictures: https://www.startech.com/en-us/cards-adapters/pciusb7

So does it only have one 9 pin header for USB devices after all?

One 9 pin header that provides 2 USB ports. USB needs 4 wires: 5V, GND, D+ and D-.

Ah… but I have two 9 pin connectors. I’d need two? 8 USB ports in the back seems like a bit overkill. Or… find a PCI sound card with a 9 pin header for the frontal audio inputs.

Oh, I think you'd need a sound card for the front panel audio anyway. It sounds like you need an audio header for the sound and a USB header for the USB. I'm not up on sound cards, so I don't know if the 9 pin audio header pinout is standard (the USB one is) or if sound cards typically came with one.

Technically you could lash up an extension to connect the rear USB ports to the front panel, but that'd involve making up a 'twin USB connector to 9 pin header' cable.

Yeah… basically, I have a small panel at the bottom with a line input, mic input, and two USB ports. But it doesn’t all go through one cable, it’s split between two cables that both end with a 9 pin connector. One is labelled USB, and the other is labelled audio. Since the 9 pin connector seems to be a USB connector typically, I have no idea where to insert the audio one into.

Audio one might be AC97: https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/sup … top-boards.html

There will almost certainly be sound cards with AC97 headers, but I don't actually know.

So in theory you could put in a sound card and connect the front panel audio, and put in a USB card to connect the front panel USB.

If you also wanted to connect the card reader+USB socket adapter then you could use a USB-socket-to-header type adapter (try searching for something like USB male header to dual type A):

and plug that in to the USB sockets on the back of the motherboard (or two of the 4 sockets on that startech board).