975XBX2 CD drive audio

[wiredout]

Just when you have a system fine-tuned the way you want it *#($*%)@ happens. My ASUS P4P800SE stopped recognizing PC keyboard and USB keyboard wouldn't work either so I was forced to upgrade. ONE NOTE: If you are using onboard RAID, typically it is non-standard and will not gracefully work on your next machine unless it is identical to the previous. Learned this the hard way. I am switching to a RAID controller card in the near future to avoid the many hours of painstaking data recovery I had to go thru.

I had to spend over $700 on a new PCIe video card (cheap- its a home office PC), new memory (went 4 gigs- they don't tell you that 8gigs is supported but only if you go OS64bit), new CPU (AMD Phenom 9600), and I went with the ASUS AM2. I needed a serial port so I went with this board (it has a serial port internal but they don't include the ribbon cable to attach to it!!!!!!). Who has those anymore????
The mobo fried during install, some component near the firewire internal port, the AMD processor has a manufacturer defect that causes hangs during certain apps that run nested pages??? (The solution from AMD, turn off some feature in the bios which impacts performance!! The will have a fix but you will have to buy another CPU when its released in March!!! TigerDirect should not be selling something without full disclosure!!! Buyer Beware. I returned the mobo and CPU and went with Intel. There are so many features now that you can't get a mobo with all or at least some of each.

Problems:The D975XBX2 board appears to be missing the onboard CD drive audio connector. Am I not seeing it? If its that audio connector on the board how do you connect the 3 or 4 wire connector to that thing? How do you get audio from your CD or DVD disk to play in the system?

Onboard audio isn't recognized by WinXP, the drivers fail during the included driver disk install.
Memory-one of my OCZ 1GB PC6400 555 is either defective or the system won't recognize more than 3 gigs and they display as Single in the bios-- Shouldn't they display as dual or double being DDR2?
I am going to update the bios firmware and see if this solves the memory problem and dnload new audio drivers.
Question-Marvell or Intel RAID -which one would better performance? I think the Marvell is its own onboard controller and therefore handles processing reducing the CPU load while the Intel Matrix Storage Controller I think relies on the Intel CPU. I am guessing here until someone clears this up.
Any help is appreciated.

[bubba]

Problems:The D975XBX2 board appears to be missing the onboard CD drive audio connector. Am I not seeing it? If its that audio connector on the board how do you connect the 3 or 4 wire connector to that thing? How do you get audio from your CD or DVD disk to play in the system?

I haven't used that cable in years. Think its one of those obsolete connectors but for older systems out there they still have the hookup on the CD drive. The new SATA drives don't even have the connector.

As for your issues installing audio drivers in XP. Not sure, make sure windows is up to date, then get the newest driver off intels site and try it that way.

32bit XP will not show more than 3gb of RAM, this is a limit of 32bit OS. To see and use all 4gb you need a 64bit OS.

Marvel will give you more head aches setting up, the Intel is a little more stable.