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chopinico

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Oct 13, 2011
3
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Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Hello,

This past weekend I purchased an ASUS sound card for my 2010 Mac Pro, so that I can take advantage of Dolby Digital Live when playing games.
 
I installed the card but found that it requires a power connection as well.  The power connector on the card looks like this: http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/robscix/Snd_Cards/Xonar%20DX/Large/pwr.jpg
 
Although it came with an adapter to a standard Molex connector, as shown in this picture: http://extreme.pcgameshardware.de/attachments/78886d1235835106-test-asus-xonar-dx-100_1195.jpg
 
Currently, both of my optical drives and all four of my drive bays are in use, so it would be difficult to get power from SATA.  There are two 6-pin power cables running to my 5870HD.  Could one of those be split to give power to the sound card as well?
 
I would welcome any potential solutions.  I'm sure someone else must have run into this problem.  Why provide four PCI slots and no options for additional power?
 
Thanks a ton in advance!
 
You'll probably need a combination of adapters from your Optical drives. Just split the SATA power from one of your optical drives to SATA + Molex, and connect the sata back to the optical drive and the molex to that adapter. Shouldn't be too hard to find on newegg
 
Combine the following two cables:
  1. SATA (Male) to Molex [connect the SATA end to the available backplane connector <power + data> in the empty Optical bay]
  2. Molex to 4 pin floppy connector [attach the Molex ends together, and voila... power to the sound card]
The Male gender on the SATA connector is critical, so if you don't buy from the links I posted, please pay close attention (most are Female to go from Molex cables to SATA drives = won't work).
 
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