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I bought some no-brand sound card clones just for fun

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First post, by elmirador

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I'm searching for sound cards for my SFF retro PC build.
Other than SB0090 and Xwave YMF724, I bought some of the no-brand clone cards just for fun.

479e6ZS.jpg

6 of these 7 are ESS-based cards. 3 of the 4 Solo-1 clones are complete with boxes and driver CDs.
There's another one based on YMF754 on the way.
As you can see all boards are in red triangular shapes, probably come from some random factory in Shenzhen back in the day.
The PCB is... sparse, at most, compared to their legit counterparts.
I haven't tried them out yet but I guess they'll probably sound like crap 🤣

Even the boxes have two flavors.
Box1 front & back (All Solo-1 clones come from this box):
lphy3QH.jpg
Mk1aKks.jpg

Box2 front & back:
CA8Ftge.jpg
0RGSizx.jpg
(Does Solo-1 even support 4ch???)

One of the "solo-1"'s soldering job is absolutely disgusting.
3pEMIwj.jpg

I'll record some audio out of these cards once I got everything up and running.

HP T5710 (1.2GHz variant) / T5720 (No expansion module) / T5730 w/ expansion / T5740 w/ expansion
Toshiba Satellite 310CDT

Reply 2 of 6, by elmirador

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dionb wrote on 2021-03-09, 18:16:

Are the chips on them actually what they claim to be? Not sure about the ESS cards, but the 'Creative' chip looks suspiciously like a C-Media CMI-8378...

I'm not sure. All these cards combined cost me like $10 so I'm not having high hopes.

What I can confirm is that all "solo-1"s are probably dead.
One of these boards' PCB is so thick I can barely fit it into a PCI slot. The one with that soldering I don't even bother testing.
The rest of the two just won't output a single chime. Judging from the connectors (and brackets) maybe these are just defective units.
But the OS accepted ESS SOLO-1's driver with no problem so I guess the chips are probably real...?

HP T5710 (1.2GHz variant) / T5720 (No expansion module) / T5730 w/ expansion / T5740 w/ expansion
Toshiba Satellite 310CDT

Reply 3 of 6, by weedeewee

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from your first photo, 4 cards have capacitive coupling of the sound output with electrolytic capacitors... They could be dead, dry, causing no output to be heard... unless maybe on the off chance that you hook'm up to an amplifier and crank it up to 12.

the three on the left, the top two will need an amplifier, the bottom one, i'm not sure.

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Reply 4 of 6, by cyclone3d

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dionb wrote on 2021-03-09, 18:16:

Are the chips on them actually what they claim to be? Not sure about the ESS cards, but the 'Creative' chip looks suspiciously like a C-Media CMI-8378...

The driver CDs will tell the truth. We need to know the contents of the CDs.

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Reply 5 of 6, by elmirador

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cyclone3d wrote on 2021-03-09, 22:30:
dionb wrote on 2021-03-09, 18:16:

Are the chips on them actually what they claim to be? Not sure about the ESS cards, but the 'Creative' chip looks suspiciously like a C-Media CMI-8378...

The driver CDs will tell the truth. We need to know the contents of the CDs.

For the record, the "CREATIVE" card doesn't come with any box or driver CD whatsoever.

As for these CDs, well, they didn't tell much.
Box1's driver CD contains a bunch of drivers from CMI8738 to ESS1989.
I bet they're just like "you got all you need here, the rest is up to you."

For some reason, they put OS/2 drivers under Solo-1/Allegro's DOS driver folder. What?

Things got even weirder with box2's CD.
Other than the typical sound card drivers (CS428X, YMF7X4, ES137X), there's the driver for RTL8139 network card, VT6421 which is a RAID controller...

I believe all drivers on these CDs are available on the Internet, nothing special it seems.

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    Box2' driver CD.
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    Box1's driver CD.
    File license
    Fair use/fair dealing exception

HP T5710 (1.2GHz variant) / T5720 (No expansion module) / T5730 w/ expansion / T5740 w/ expansion
Toshiba Satellite 310CDT

Reply 6 of 6, by dionb

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"All of the above" driver CDs 😉

Time to let some software autoprobe the hardware, if it fits into a slot and doesn't hang the system before booting. I'd recommend a Linux distro like Knoppix that does extensive device discovery. No guarantees it actually supports whatever the chips are, but it should tell you what it found. Plus it's less likely to get its knickers into a twist over PCI_ID not matching any driver it has the way Windows sometimes does. And for some reason I don't trust that these cards will have correct IDs...

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