Motherboard question
 

Hell guy's/gal's ive bought a gigabyte ep35 ds3 motherboard and i noticed small pcie 1 pcie 2 pcie 3 sockets it has the usual pci and one pci express socket, but what are the small sockets for they are only about 30mm long ?
can someone tell me.

Thanks
MelVic

doesn't the motherboard manual mention them?

are they little tiny red sockets? if so its s-ata most likely

All the Manual shows is pcie_1 pcie_2 pcie_3 and pcie_16 what i want to know is what uses the pcie_1, 2 and 3 sockets.

MelVic

PS. the sockets are black

i'd guess that extra video cards, raid controllers and so on would use it...

Oh ok thanks :)

They look like PCI-E x1 slots, so as TippeX says, used for any x1 PCI-E cards like graphics or network cards!!

BarryB is right, those little sockets are PCI Express 1x sockets, they are used for powerfull ethernet cards and even in some cases, sound cards. I´ve also seen it used for sata PCI-e card.

Motherboard question
 

I have a Gigabyte GA-81945PM-RH motherboard with HD Audio drivers. I cannot get the sound to work. It would also be nice to find the motherboard drivers but they are not listed on Gigabytes site.
Vista says the drivers are installed under the device manager but a speaker appears on the task bar that says "no audio output device installed. Can anyone help me?

crewcutter

Are you sure that's the right model number? I know that the 81945 bit is wrong; it's 8I945, but the rest may also be wrong at that rate. I looked around gigabyte's website for you pretty generally and found nothing related that number.

If it is correct, then i'm guessing that it's some special, customized board like those used by PC manufacturers such as Dell. These are notorious for having wierdo model-numbers, and drivers sometimes never become fully available. If you have such a machine, you're probably best off rooting out the discs that originally came with it and installing it from there.

If, on the other hand you can find out what the sound chipset is, you can go straight to their website (for example Realtek or Soundmax). You could grab some diagnostic software like Lavalys' Everest, Belarc or Sisoft's Sandra. This will give you precise info. After which, googe is your friend ;)

As Psych said, your best choice is using something liek Belarc (belarc.com, it´s free) and running it, this will give you specific info about your sound chip, after you have the exact model, just google it for drivers.